Beijing rolled out a multipronged attack on U.S. intelligence agencies on Wednesday after President Biden received a long-anticipated intelligence report that is reported to be inconclusive about the origins of the novel coronavirus.

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       China Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused the United States of using coronavirus origin-tracing to suppress other countries, and called the report political instead of scientific. He also pushed back against criticism from U.S. officials that China has obstructed international efforts to get information about the earliest days of the pandemic.

       “The United States says it lacks information from China,” Wang said at the ministry’s daily news conference, according to the state-run China News service. “I can tell the United States that this is just an excuse to cover up the failure of its intelligence in origin tracing.”

       Biden receives inconclusive intelligence report on covid origins

       The U.S. intelligence report is the result of a 90-day review that Biden ordered in May, after limited progress by the World Health Organization in determining the cause of the pandemic. WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and others have criticized China for hindering efforts to find the pandemic’s origin.

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       Debate over the coronavirus’s origins has raged for most of the pandemic, with no direct proof for any of the theories, and prominent scientists backing different stances.

       Much of the Chinese response this week seemed preplanned for worst-case scenarios of what the U.S. report might say. State media blasted U.S. intelligence agencies for cherry-picking evidence to support a predetermined conclusion, even as sources told The Washington Post the report is inconclusive about if the virus may have come about in a natural process or escaped from a lab.

       The push included statements this week from multiple Chinese embassies around the world — an increasingly frequent occurrence, as Beijing encourages its diplomats to be more forceful in defending the country.

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       China’s ambassador to the United Nations, Chen Xu, sent a letter Monday to Tedros, declaring that the U.S. military lab at Fort Detrick is the one that should be under investigation, instead of any Chinese labs, according to a statement from the Chinese mission in Geneva. The mission said Tedros was also sent a petition signed by 25 million Chinese netizens requesting an investigation of the Fort Detrick lab.

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       The Chinese Embassy in Egypt held a news conference on Monday to denounce the U.S. intelligence report as a product of conspiracy theories.

       Beijing’s publicity campaign against U.S. intelligence agencies appeared to find a ready domestic audience, tapping into long-standing mistrust in China about how Western intelligence agencies operate. The hashtag “Dig out the dark history of U.S. intelligence agencies” was trending on Wednesday, with more than 10 million views on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.

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       Chinese state media outlets ran lengthy reports accusing U.S. intelligence agencies of fabricating information for political purposes, with many of them mentioning the faulty intelligence that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, which President George W. Bush used as justification for the Iraq War. They also mentioned historic links between American journalists and the CIA.

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       “The U.S. intelligence agencies are notorious,” one commentary piece in the state-run People’s Daily international edition said. “Who would believe that its investigation conclusions are impartial and professionally authoritative?”

       Beijing’s attack on the CIA seemed partly aimed at deflecting international criticism about China’s lack of cooperation with the coronavirus origins search.

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       China declared last month it will no longer cooperate with the World Health Organization’s probe, after the organization’s leadership said they believed further review of Chinese virology labs was merited.

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