By Uzma Zafar
ISLAMABAD: The Foreign Office Spokesperson Sunday trashed a news story appearing in ‘Klaxon’, an Australian news website, about China’s Wuhan Laboratory conducting alleged covert operations in Pakistan as ‘a politically motivated and fake story, composed of distortion of facts and fabrications that quote anonymous sources’.
In response to a media question about the Klaxon story, the spokesperson in a press release said that there was nothing secret about the Bio-Safety Level-3 (BSL-3) Laboratory of Pakistan referred to in the report.
“Pakistan has been sharing information about the facility with the States Parties to the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention (BTWC) in its submission of Confidence Building Measures.
The facility is meant for diagnostic and protective system improvement by Research and Development (R&D) on emerging health threats, surveillance and disease outbreak investigation,” it added.
The press release further said Pakistan strictly abides by its BTWC obligations and has been one of the most vocal supporters for a strong verification mechanism to ensure full compliance by the states parties to the convention.
“The attempt to cast aspersions about the facility is particularly absurd against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the need for better preparedness in the areas of disease surveillance and control and international collaborations in that regard, consistent with Article X of BTWC,” the spokesperson maintained.
Moreover, the Wuhan Institute of Virology came under scrutiny in April with the US probing whether the virus actually originated in the virology institute located in China’s coronavirus epicentre with a high-security biosafety laboratory. Chinese scientists have said the virus likely jumped from an animal to humans in a market that sold wildlife. But the existence of the facility has fuelled conspiracy theories that the germ spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically its P4 laboratory which is equipped to handle dangerous viruses.
