The spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in the United States on Tuesday urged The Washington Post (WP) to stop publishing misleading and unfactual editorials on COVID-19 origins. Read:China rebuffs WHO’s terms for further COVID-19 origins study The Washington Post editorial "Hunting the virus origins" dated Sept. 1 "distorts the facts about COVID-19 origins tracing and is seriously misleading for the readers," said the spokesperson. To set the record straight, the Chinese embassy has responded to the WP editorial board with a letter, asking for it to be published, but was refused. "After that, the WP published other editorials and letters claiming that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from Chinese laboratories," said the spokesperson. Read: Little new evidence emerges in US probe of Covid-19 origins "This shows the WP has no respect for science, facts, or freedoms of the press and of speech; it could not lend an ear to objective and fair voices," the spokesperson said. The embassy has posted the letter in full on its website.

Halfway through the 90-day review into the origins of Covid-19, the US intelligence community is still divided on whether the disease leaked from a laboratory in China's Wuhan city or was transmitted from animals to humans. Little new evidence has emerged in the US' ongoing investigation into the origins of Covid-19, CNN reported citing multiple sources familiar with the review. Read: Scientists reject Covid-19 conspiracy claims over lab origin However, top Biden administration officials such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and federal agencies like the CIA now think the laboratory leak theory is plausible, marking a shift in their initial thinking. In recent months, the idea that the pandemic started somehow in a laboratory – and perhaps involved an engineered virus – has gained traction, especially with President Joe Biden ordering a review of US intelligence to assess the possibility in May. The US leader gave the intelligence community 90 days to complete the report. Read: EXPLAINER: The US investigation into COVID-19 origins China has struck back aggressively, arguing that attempts to link the origins of Covid-19 to a lab are politically motivated and has suggested that the outbreak might have started abroad. Meanwhile, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday acknowledged it was "premature" to rule out a potential link between the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that travelled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of Covid-19. He said there had been a "premature push" to rule out the theory that the virus might have escaped from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan – undermining the WHO's own March report, which concluded that a laboratory leak was "extremely unlikely." The first human cases were identified in Wuhan. Tedros told reporters that the UN health agency is "asking China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic."

A team from the World Health Organization is scheduled to visit later this week a laboratory in China's Wuhan, from which the novel coronavirus is rumored to have accidentally released, sources close to the matter said Monday.

After a two-week quarantine, the real work can begin. Maybe.

Chinese state media have played up questions about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and whether it could be lethal to the very old. A government spokesperson suggests the coronavirus could have emerged from a U.S. military lab.