Translation, editing : Gan Yung Chyan, KUCINTA SETIA
Breaking news! Beijing killed tens of millions of people, Merkel refused to admit it and suppressed German intelligence cooperation
— Merkel is once again at the center of controversy for her partiality to Beijing
Editor : Fang Xun / Source: RFI / https://www.aboluowang.com/2025/0314/2189218.html
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday denied accusations in German media that she concealed an intelligence report that concluded a leak from a Chinese laboratory could be the source of the Covid-19 outbreak. German media condemned that German authorities were concerned that the release of the intelligence report would cause further panic among the public and wanted to avoid a diplomatic crisis with Beijing.
"Merkel explicitly denies this accusation," the former German chancellor's office said in a statement to the German daily Daily Mirror.
Germany's Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung published investigative reports that Germany's counterintelligence agency (BND) concluded in 2020 that an accidental leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the cause of the global spread of the virus, with an estimated probability of between 80% and 95%.
The contents of these German intelligence reports were released five years after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
At the time, the German Chancellery instructed the German Federal Intelligence Service to conduct its own investigation, according to reports.
But the decision by the governments then led by Angela Merkel and, from December 2021, by Social Democrat Olaf Scholz to lock up the investigation files "prevented the report's conclusions from being made public," according to newspaper reports.
German authorities reportedly feared further panic among the population and wanted to avoid a diplomatic crisis with Beijing.
The former chancellor (2005-2021) also said on Thursday that she could not comment on the details of the allegations, referring to the current chancellor's office, where government archives are kept.
But even at the height of the pandemic, Germany's then-Health Minister Jens Spahn insisted that he knew nothing about a secret report from the BND. "I only heard about it through the media," he told German television RTL. But he pointed out that the laboratory leak theory had been discussed for five years and that even if the source of the virus had been identified earlier, it would "have had no impact" on the health measures taken at the time to curb the epidemic.
Image : Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel file photo © Michael Kappeler/AP/SIPA
As in other countries, containment measures remain hotly debated and controversial in Germany.
And whether covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory or spread from animals to humans remains controversial.
However, most of the scientific community tends to believe that the virus was transmitted to humans through an intermediate animal, possibly infected by bats.
Similarly, some US agencies, such as the FBI and the Department of Energy, have also supported the hypothesis of a laboratory leak to varying degrees, while other intelligence agencies tend to believe that the leak occurred naturally.
In Beijing, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called on Thursday for "scientists" to decide the origin of the novel coronavirus when asked about the claims of German media, according to AFP. "This issue should be viewed in a scientific spirit," said Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry. According to her, four years ago, a joint report by WHO experts and Chinese scientists judged the laboratory accident theory "extremely unlikely" and favored transmission from animals to humans.
According to Time magazine, the German Foreign Intelligence Service conducted its own investigation in 2020, called the "Saaremaa Project," led by the intelligence agency's scientific department.
To do this, German intelligence relied on a large amount of Chinese data collected by German intelligence officers, including scientific works, and unpublished doctoral dissertations conducted in Wuhan in 2019 and 2020, as well as studies including the impact of the coronavirus on the human brain, according to the magazine.
Grok analyzed the existing data and found that the global death toll from the covid pandemic is extremely tragic. It is based on the latest estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and other authoritative agencies. The global death toll caused by the covid pandemic (COVID-19) is usually measured in "excess deaths," a number that includes deaths directly caused by the new coronavirus as well as deaths indirectly caused by the epidemic. As of now, there is no absolutely accurate total because the data is still being updated and the statistical methods of different countries are different.
According to estimates released by the WHO in May 2022, the number of excess deaths directly or indirectly related to the covid pandemic between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 was approximately 14.9 million (range 13.3 million to 16.6 million). This is nearly 10 million more than the officially reported death toll at the time (approximately 5.5 million).
Since then, the epidemic has continued to develop. The WHO mentioned in May 2023 that the official death toll reported worldwide was close to 7 million but the actual number of deaths may be "several times higher." Some research institutions (such as The Economist) have estimated through models that the global covid death toll may be close to 20 million as of early 2022. Considering that the epidemic lasted until 13 March 2025 (today) and there is a lack of comprehensive and updated global data, the actual number of deaths may be higher.
Summary:
Officially reported deaths: about 7 million (as of 2023).
Excess deaths estimate: 14.9 million (2020-2021), possibly as high as 20 million or more (after 2022).
Due to incomplete data and statistical differences, the true number may still be underestimated.
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