Beijing
China has issued a lengthy rebuttal of what it said were 24 “preposterous allegations” by some leading US politicians over its handling of the new coronavirus outbreak.
The Chinese foreign ministry in a 30-page, 11,000-word article posted on its website on Saturday night repeated and expanded on the refutations made during the press briefings, and began by invoking Abraham Lincoln, the 19th century US president.
“As Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all the time and fool all the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” it said in the prologue.
The article also cited media reports that said Americans had been infected with the virus before the first case was confirmed in Wuhan.
Keen to quash US suggestions that the virus was deliberately created or somehow leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the article said that all evidence shows the virus is not man-made and that the institute is not capable of synthesising a new coronavirus.
The article also provided a timeline of how China had provided information to the international community in a “timely.– Agencies
