“The Chancellor rejects the accusation very clearly,” Angela Merkel’s office said on Thursday, March 13, in a declaration sent to the German daily Tagesspiegel. According to a survey published by the weekly Die Zeit and everyday life Süddeutsche Zeitungthe German counterintelligence service (BND) had arrived in 2020 at the conclusion, with a probability evaluated between 80 and 95 %, that an accidental leak in the Wuhan laboratory, in China, had been behind the global spread of the virus.
Five years after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVVI-19 pandemic, new revelations shed light on the investigation by the BND. Charged by the Chancellery to examine the origin of the virus, the intelligence service would have seen its conclusions remain locked. According to several newspapers, successive governments (first that of Angela Merkel, then that of Olaf Scholz from December 2021) – would actively prevented the revelation of these elements by stifling the investigation file. A reasoned decision, according to these sources, for fear of general panic and a diplomatic incident with China.
The ex-leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) said Thursday that he could not rule on the details of the accusations, referring to the current Chancellery which records the government archives.
The German Minister of Health at the time of the peak of the pandemic, Jens Spahn, said he did not know anything about a secret BND report. “I only heard about it through the media,” he said on the RTL-Germany channel. However, he recalled that the laboratory leak thesis had been mentioned for five years already and that, even if the origin of the virus had been identified earlier, this would have made “no difference” for the health measures taken at the time to stem the pandemic.
Containment measures are still very discussed and controversial in Germany, as in other countries. The question of whether the COVVI-19 has accidentally escaped from a laboratory or has spread from an animal to the human being remains debated.
A large part of the scientific community continues to favor the hypothesis of a transmission of the virus to humans by an intermediate animal, possibly infected with a bat. In the United States, the FBI and the Ministry of Energy consider a laboratory flight, although their level of certainty varies, while other intelligence agencies lean rather for a natural origin. Asked about the revelations of the German press, the Chinese Foreign Ministry, for its part, called on Thursday to let “scientists” decide on the origin of the virus.
“This question should be addressed in a scientific spirit,” said his spokesperson, Mao Ning, recalling that a common report of Chinese WHO experts and scientists had judged four years ago that the thesis of a laboratory accident was “extremely improbable” and leaned for transmission to human beings by an animal.
The German external intelligence service had conducted its own investigation in 2020, called “Saaremaa Project” and led by its scientific department, according to Die Zeit. To do this, he reached a large quantity of Chinese data collected by his agents, including scientific work, including unremonious doctorates made in Wuhan in 2019 and 2020, and examining the impact of coronavirus on the human brain, adds the weekly.