GENEVA -- A senior Chinese diplomat said on Tuesday that the labs of Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina (UNC) in the United States should be subject to "transparent investigation with full access" for the origins tracing of COVID-19.

Ambassador Chen Xu, permanent representative of China to the United Nations (UN) Office at Geneva, said in his letter to World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus that the hypothesis of introduction of SARS-CoV-2 -- the virus that causes COVID-19 -- into human population was caused by lab leak in the Wuhan Institute of Virology is "extremely unlikely."

The following is the full text of the non-paper attached to the letter by the diplomat entitled "Coronavirus Research Conducted by Dr. Ralph Baric's Team at University of North Carolina."

Dr. Ralph Baric and his team from the UNC have been systematically working on coronavirus-related researches for a long time, including Gain-of-Function (GOF) research. They possess synthetic biology techniques used for manipulation and modification of coronavirus genome and have applied for multiple patents related to coronavirus research.

In the aftermath of the SARS outbreak in 2003, the Baric team collaborated with the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID) and developed a novel reverse genetic system for synthesis of a full-length cDNA of the SARS-CoV, which was published in a paper in 2003. The paper claimed that within two months after obtaining the RNA of the SARS virus, the full-length cDNA of the virus was successfully synthesized, which shows that as early as 2003, these institutes already had advanced capabilities to synthesize and modify SARS-related coronavirus.