On Thursday, China urged caution and political restraint after reports that Germany’s BND intelligence agency had gathered plausible evidence of the coronavirus pandemic.

“On the issue of the Coronavirus, China firmly rejects any form of political posturing,’’ Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in Beijing.

She said any discussion of the scientific issues surrounding COVID-19 should be left to scientists.

Ms Mao also noted that an international team led by the World Health Organisation had visited the Wuhan lab as part of their investigation into the pandemic’s origins.

The team largely dismissed the so-called “lab leak’’ theory in 2021.

Still, the WHO has emphasised that all hypotheses regarding the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus remain on the table.

As recently as December, the UN agency called on Beijing to provide more pandemic-related data.

The reports were published in the three newspapers on Wednesday – Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Die Zeit also said that the BND and Germany’s Chancellery had asked scientists to examine the evidence regarding the lab leak theory.

It posited that the Sars-CoV-2 virus, which caused the COVID-19 disease, originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research on Coronaviruses.

It began spreading through some sort of accident or failure at the lab.
The findings by the German intelligence community have not been made public.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported that while the BND had plausible evidence to support the theory, not all the researchers on the panel were convinced.

The other major theory for the pandemic’s origin is that the virus had a purely natural origin, just like the SARS outbreak in 2002-3.

(dpa/NAN)