In his latest controversial statement, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil suggested that the coronavirus pandemic still claiming victims around the globe could be “biological warfare” waged by China, AFP reported.
“It’s a new virus. Nobody knows whether it was born in a laboratory or because a human ate some animal they shouldn’t have,” the far-right leader said.
“But the military knows all about chemical, biological and radiological warfare. Could we be fighting a new war? I wonder. Which country’s GDP has grown the most?”
Bolsonaro did not explicitly name China, though it was the only G20 country whose economy grew last year (by 2.3 percent).
This was not the first time the Brazilian leader had made inflammatory comments regarding China, even though the Asian giant is Brazil’s largest trading partner.
Suggestions that COVID-19 did not accidentally emerge but could have been manufactured in a laboratory are not new. Those making such claims point to the fact that a huge government-funded virology laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where COVID-19 first emerged, was known to be experimenting with coronaviruses.
A World Health Organization report concluded in March it was “extremely unlikely” the virus originated in a lab, and China strenuously denies the allegations. However, WHO experts who visited China in order to try and identify the source of the pandemic reported that they encountered obstacles to data access when they visited Wuhan, lending more force to the suspicions that the virus was either accidentally or purposely leaked.