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WHO urged to investigate sudden closure of ‘secretive laboratory’

More than half a million Chinese people have signed a joint letter to the World Health Organisation (WHO) calling for it to investigate the sudden closure of a secretive laboratory in the United States.

They are concerned that the Fort Detrick lab in Maryland closed without coming under international scrutiny.

It comes at a time when politicians and media organisations are smearing China as the source of coronavirus, with US President Joe Biden trying to resurrect the discredited “lab leak theory.”

The WHO has been asked to investigate the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Its Fort Detrick headquarters stores some of the most deadly and infectious viruses in the world, including Ebola, smallpox and coronavirus. But according to the open letter it “has a notorious record on lab safety,” with a number of leaks and the theft of anthrax.

“There was a leakage incident in the lab in the autumn of 2019 right before the outbreak of Covid-19. However, detailed information has been withheld by the US under excuses of national security,” the letter says.

The lab was shut down in 2019 following a US Centre for Disease and Prevention inspection. 

Last month a study from US regulators found that Covid-19 was present in the country prior to December 2019, weeks before the first documented infection.

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