President Biden has asked U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to determine if COVID-19 emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan or from animal transmission, according to a report from The New York Times.
Biden’s request for a “broad government report” comes as top American scientists and government officials call for an independent investigation unencumbered by Chinese meddling. Biden wants to be fully apprised within 90 days.
“It is our position that we need to get to the bottom of this, and we need a completely transparent process from China. We need the WHO to assist in that matter. We don’t feel like we have that now,” said Andy Slavitt, the White House senior adviser on the coronavirus response. “That’s a critical priority for us,” he added at a White House press briefing on Tuesday.
Also on Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told a gathering hosted by the WHO that international investigators should be given “the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak.” He said the inquiry should be “transparent” and “science-based.”
The United Nations – working with China – had released a report on the origins of COVID-19, but it was undermined by a lack of access to original data and medical samples. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN that the Biden administration has “real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it.”
When COVID-19 first emerged in the United States, some American officials – including Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) – suggested that it was created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This theory was quickly labeled a debunked, fringe conspiracy, and a consensus emerged that the deadly virus originated in bats and then crossed-over to the human population.
In April 2020, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, then controlled by the Trump White House, asserted that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”
But the ‘lab leak’ theory has regained credibility in recent weeks. Earlier this month, a group of prominent scientists penned a letter in the respected journal Science saying “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable.”
And a recent report in The Wall Street Journal found that:
Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.
At the White House press briefing on Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious-disease scientist, said he believes the virus originated from a “natural occurrence,” but “because we don’t know 100 percent what the origin is, it’s imperative that we look and we do an investigation.”
