Former Trump administration officials aren’t happy President Joe Biden is casting any doubt that COVID-19 potentially emerged from a lab in China.
Biden on Wednesday acknowledged the possibility of a lab leak. But in a statement, he said government officials are split over the virus’s likely origins, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”
Biden said one of “two likely scenarios” caused the COVID-19 outbreak, and he urged the intelligence community to “redouble” its investigations. A report is due in 90 days.
For onetime Trump administration officials, though, the evidence is clear.
“All the reporting showed that the percentage of this not being developed in a lab was extremely small,” said one former senior official familiar with Trump administration interagency inquiries. “Like, lightning would have to strike twice.”
“We had extensive efforts trying to get to the bottom of this on all sides,” the official added, citing diplomatic and spy agency investigations. “Anything more is just going to add color.”
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The Biden administration’s acknowledgment of the Chinese lab theory — a speculation that seeks to explain the origin of the coronavirus, which has claimed more than 591,000 lives in the United States, according to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine — marks a shift from a day earlier. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Biden “believes there needs to be an independent investigation, one that’s run by the international community.”
Asked on Wednesday what prompted the change, principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre answered it was “nothing.”
“The president had asked his team to look into this back in March,” Jean-Pierre said.
The White House has been reluctant to acknowledge the possibility that the virus emerged from a Wuhan lab, a claim touted by former President Donald Trump that China has strenuously denied. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also claimed there was a “significant amount of evidence” to support this theory.
But renewed interest from the public and from Congress, including some Democratic Party lawmakers, has prompted top health officials to call for more research into the early days of the outbreak.
Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra urged the World Health Organization on Tuesday to pursue a second international investigation.
A former senior Trump official pushed back on this, suggesting the global health agency was not a reliable partner.
”Biden’s team wants the WHO to investigate the origins of the virus. How can the WHO be trusted, given its track record? It can’t,” the former State Department official said.
The first official denied that the State Department’s inquiry was politically motivated, or in search of evidence to fit a thesis implicating China.
The second official said an inquiry shut down by the new administration helped prepare the U.S. for WHO board meetings and a WHO delegation trip to Wuhan.
Security at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the site of the suspected leak, has concerned U.S. officials for years, predating COVID-19’s emergence, he said.
CNN reported Tuesday Biden’s team shuttered the effort “amid concerns about the legitimacy of the evidence.”
The second Trump official said this was an unfair characterization leveled by people acting recklessly “just to score political points.”
“This is very dangerous because it politicizes the only credible investigation we had going,” this person said.
The State Department has pushed back on the charge that the Biden administration abandoned the inquiry, calling this “incorrect.”
“In February and March of 2021, the team’s findings were briefed to [Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance] and Policy Planning policy staff in the new administration. With the report delivered, the work was ended,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.
Still, the White House has been slow to acknowledge U.S. efforts and has publicly urged agencies to press forward, preferring to call for an international process.
The White House did respond to questions about the administration’s efforts.
“The Biden administration sees this as a sideshow,” said the first former State Department official, who emphasized the independence of the original investigations, such as the efforts of the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency.
“There were lines of effort from every different agency that had a stake in it. From [U.S. Department of Agriculture], USDA, the biodefense work at State, Intel, [Department of Defense]. Everybody was working in concert on this,” he added. “They presented the facts, and they were interpreted in a position-neutral manner. There was no politics behind it.”
The issue is becoming harder to ignore amid new reports and pressure from Congress for a broader inquiry.
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019, appearing to confirm details in a fact sheet shared by the Trump State Department in January last year.
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“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” the document said.
