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 Hours after the WHO team revealed preliminary findings at a Wuhan
news conference on Tuesday, Washington said it wants to scrutinize
data used by the team, which concluded that the virus causing
COVID-19 did not originate in a laboratory in Wuhan, and that bats
remain a likely source.
"We wish that the U.S. side can, like China, uphold an open and
transparent attitude, and be able to invite WHO experts to the U.S.
to conduct origin tracing research and inspection," Chinese foreign
ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a regular daily briefing,
repeating a call it has been making recently.
The origins of the coronavirus pandemic, which first emerged in
Wuhan in late 2019, are highly politicized, with China pushing the
idea that the virus has roots outside its borders.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday that the Biden
administration had not been involved in the "planning and
implementation" of the WHO investigation and wants to take an
independent review of its findings and underlying data.
"The U.S. independently examining the WHO's data? It's the WHO who
should examine the U.S. data," said Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the
Global Times, a tabloid run by the ruling Communist Party's official
People’s Daily, on social media platform Weibo.
"Did we all mishear, or is this spokesperson really so shameless?"
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 Peter Ben Embarek, who heads
the WHO-led team that spent four weeks in China
- two of them in quarantine - said that the
investigation had not dramatically changed its
picture of the outbreak, although the virus
could have crossed borders before arriving in
Wuhan. In addition to ruling out
a lab leak, he said that frozen food could possibly be a means of
transmitting the virus, which would support a thesis backed by
Beijing, which has blamed some case clusters on imported food
packaging.
The WHO's conclusion "completely refutes the conspiracy theory
raised by some anti-China hawks, like former US secretary of state
Mike Pompeo, who has been accusing the Wuhan Institute of Virology
of leaking the virus," the Global Times wrote.
Pompeo had said there was "a significant amount of evidence" that
the new coronavirus emerged from a Chinese laboratory.
Chinese officials have stressed in recent months that the virus
could have emerged in multiple regions outside China.
(Reporting by Gabriel Crossley; Editing by Tony Munroe and Raju
Gopalakrishnan)
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