CHINA has brazenly claimed the Covid pandemic may have started in the US in a desperate bid to bat away growing scrutiny over a lab leak.

The extraordinary accusation was made in a new White Paper released by Beijing’s State Council Information Office.

This follows The Sun’s explosive Covid lab leak documentary, which exposed the increasing evidence and troubling questions about the virus’s emergence in Wuhan, the location of China’s most secretive bio-research facility.

Recently, the US introduced a shocking new webpage on the origins of Covid, attributing the release of the deadly virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In a recent propaganda effort, Beijing now asserts that “substantial evidence” suggests Covid “might have emerged in the United States earlier than its officially-claimed timeline, and before the outbreak in China”.

The document – titled Covid-19 Prevention, Control and Origins Tracing: China’s Actions and Stance – was released via China’s official Xinhua news agency.

It unashamedly accused the US of “indifference and delayed actions” during the global Covid fight – and of scapegoating China to deflect from its own “mismanaged” response.

It fumed: “The US has made China the primary scapegoat for its own mismanaged COVID-19 response.”

The report added that America was “spreading misinformation” and wasted “precious time China had secured for the global fight against the pandemic”.

It revived Beijing’s long-standing claims that it shared information with the world in a “timely manner”.

The paper added: “The US should not continue to ‘pretend to be deaf and dumb’, but should respond to the legitimate concerns of the international community.”

Beijing’s move comes after the White house on April 18 launched a new Covid-19 site – directly stating for the first time that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

It also slams former President Joe Biden, ex-top health chief Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organisation for mishandling the crisis.

The CIA recently changed its own stance – concluding in January that the pandemic was more likely to have come from a lab leak in China than natural origins.

The FBI and the US Department of Energy have also backed a lab leak as the most likely explanation.

Top lawmakers have demanded the UK government launch a probe into the origins after The Sun’s documentary on the lab leak scandal.

The virus has claimed more than seven million lives since emerging in late 2019 in Wuhan – where the first known cases were recorded.

It declared the outbreak a pandemic in March 2020 and officially ended the public health emergency status in May last year.

Last December, a bombshell Congress report concluded Covid most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan.

The 520-page report revealed that the Department of Justice probed a EcoHealth Alliance – a virus-hunting organisation based in New York – for clues about the origins of Covid, and potential criminal conduct.

After a two-year investigation involving dozens of interviews and high-profile hearings, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said the “weight of evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis”.

It added: “By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.”

The report noted that Wuhan Institute of Virology was China’s top coronavirus research lab and it had “a history of conducting research at inadequate biosafety levels”.

It added that researchers at the lab “were sick with a Covid-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before Covid-19 was discovered at the wet market”.

The report accused the Chinese government, agencies in the US government and even members of the scientific community of a “cover up”.

It also implicates EcoHealth Alliance – who worked with the Wuhan lab using taxpayer cash.

The Great Covid Cover-up

By Imogen Braddick, Assistant Foreign Editor

FEW of us had heard of the Chinese city of Wuhan when the world was first paralysed by Covid-19 five years ago.

Today, the sprawling metropolis is synonymous with the ­pandemic that claimed 227,000 lives in the UK — along with its sinister labs where top secret biological experiments are ­carried out.

Within the first few days of Britain’s initial lockdown in March 2020, as millions were confined to their homes, questions were already being asked about whether Wuhan’s ­Institute of Virology could be behind the outbreak.

Now, as the country marks the five-year anniversary of Covid-19, an exclusive documentary by The Sun reveals the experts, scientists and investigators who not only believe the virus was caused by a lab leak, but that American scientists helped to cover up the scandal.

Our documentary took me to the heart of the origins of Covid and explores whether China was trying to cover up the creation of a ­biological weapon by blaming the pandemic on a wet food market 17 miles away.

We also reveal that, while scientists publicly insisted the disease came from “natural” sources, behind the scenes they were exchanging messages about a laboratory leak.

One expert told us: “Watergate was nothing compared to this.

“This is the Chernobyl of biology.”

Dr Robert Redfield, the former head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said that a few months before the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute was taken over by the Chinese military while officials deleted its databases and took on a contract for a new ventilation system.

We now know that three lab researchers fell ill in November 2019 — a month before the first Covid cases were reported to the World Health Organisation.

“I think that’s when the pandemic started,” said Dr Redfield, describing a “frenzied cover-up that was keeping Chinese President Xi Jinping up at night”.

The US virologist says he was “aggressively silenced” when he voiced fears Covid had leaked from the lab, where “Batwoman” scientist Shi Zhengli was carrying out experiments on strains of coronavirus.