Photo: Xinhua

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying on Monday called the US Secretary of State and anti-China hawk Mike Pompeo "Mr Liar," snubbing claims made in a US Department of State document that suggest the novel coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab and had a military background.

"The statement and the list are full of conspiracies and lies, which are consistent with certain US officials who have dealt with the pandemic in a passive way and constantly shifted the blame to others. The list is another US-made list of lies," Hua told a press conference on Monday.

Pompeo, a long-time anti-China hawk in the Trump administration, tweeted at least 30 anti-China posts during the past weekend, including all kinds of verbal attacks on China's political system, Chinese media, China's response to COVID-19 and other China-related topics such as Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the South China Sea. Such concentrated attacks have been painted as a vivid display of his final hysteria by Chinese observers and many netizens.

This also fully showed that some US politicians ignored public safety and lives, go against science and are obsessed with making propaganda about conspiracies and spreading "the political virus," Hua noted. "This is also the final madness staged by Pompeo, this Mr. Liar," she said.

Hua also said that the so-called document about China interfering with the investigation on the origin of the coronavirus is not in line with facts, and the country has taken the most comprehensive, thorough and strictest measures in curbing the epidemic, winning time for the globe to fight this battle. China has also been actively communicating with the WHO on tracing the origin of the virus since the beginning, and invited WHO experts in February and July in 2020 to come to China to study its origins, Hua added.

Officials and experts around the world have emphasized that the origin and transmission pattern of the novel coronavirus are scientific questions and should be left to scientists and medical experts to study, and China has always held an open and objective attitude to working with scientists around the world on this question.

The claims that COVID-19 came from a "lab" and that the Wuhan virology lab has a "military background" are groundless, the so-called list made by the US is full of contradictions and lies, and nearly every top scientist and CDC expert has already rejected them, Hua noted.

"What I want to emphasize is if the US truly respects science and facts, it should open the Fort Detrick laboratory and make questions about its over 200 overseas labs open to the public, while inviting WHO experts to look into the origins and answer the international community's suspicions," she said.