China slams US for hyping Covid-19 source theory

Bloomberg

China accused the US of promoting theories that the coronavirus escaped from a high-security lab in Wuhan, as a fresh report about sick workers at the facility prompted Beijing to reaffirm denials.
“The report that you mentioned about three people getting sick, that is not true,”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular briefing on Monday in Beijing. Zhao was responding to a Wall Street Journal report that a trio of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of
Virology had fallen ill and sought hospital care in November 2019.
The facility previously denied claims of workers getting sick, including a US State Department fact sheet published in January that asserts that several researchers from the institute became sick in autumn 2019. Zhao said the US has been hyping the lab-leak theory.
The spread of Covid-19 in the US continues to slow, with the country ending its first week since June with no days of infections exceeding 30,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg.
Still, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that under-vaccinated areas in the US could become hot spots for a mutation of the coronavirus first detected in India and is increasing surveillance of the more-transmissible variant.
Asia sped up actions to tackle the resurgence of the coronavirus in the region with plans to vaccinate more people, faster testing and further restrictions imposed. Singapore has approved a Covid breath test that gives results within a minute, while Japan has opened large-scale vaccination centers in Tokyo and Osaka and Malaysia is rolling out new curbs.