China's Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that the China-related part of a bill signed by US President Joe Biden on the origin of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is a distortion of the truth.
Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told a news briefing that his country "demands that the United States immediately stop political manipulation."
On Monday, the US president issued a law declassifying intelligence about possible links between the coronavirus and its leak from a virology laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Biden said he shared Congress' goal of releasing as much information about the origin of COVID-19 as possible, but added that his administration would take national security into account when deciding what information to release.
Earlier in March, FBI Director Christopher Wray said it was "very likely" that the pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, two days after a similar hypothesis put forward by the U.S. Department of Energy, which Beijing vehemently denies.
But scientists remain divided over the origin of the virus, and whether it was transmitted to humans from an infected animal or leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
A highly politicized debate about the origin of the coronavirus has been raging in Washington since the first human case was reported in China, amid calls from Democrats and Republicans for President Biden to respond stronger to Beijing.
The Corona outbreak began in 2019 in the city of Wuhan, causing the death of about 7 million people worldwide so far, according to official statistics, including more than one million in the United States.