President Joe Biden called upon the intelligence community to “redouble” its investigation into whether COVID-19 originated in nature or from a Wuhan lab leak.
In a statement, he revealed that two spy agencies are leaning toward a zoonotic source, while one leans toward a laboratory accident, with the rest unsure as of yet.
“I have now asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days,” Biden said in the White House press release. “As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China. I have also asked that this effort include work by our National Labs and other agencies of our government to augment the Intelligence Community’s efforts. And I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work.”
Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, which has killed 3.49 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University. Both administrations have cast doubt on the manner in which the study from China and the World Health Organization was conducted in early 2021. Though the WHO-China report said a jump from animals to humans was most likely, Trump officials, Republican leaders, and a number of scientists have pointed to an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a highly plausible origin for the pandemic.
The intelligence community is composed of 18 spy agencies, and Biden, seemingly quoting the intelligence community’s position, said that agencies have “coalesced around two likely scenarios” and that their current position is that “while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter — each with low or moderate confidence — the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.”
Biden added: “The United States will also keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence.”
The president said that in March, he had his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, “task the intelligence community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.” He said he received that report earlier in May and requested “additional follow-up” because the intelligence community “has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question.”
Former President Donald Trump said Monday that he has “very, very little doubt” COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan laboratory.
A State Department fact sheet released in mid-January under the waning Trump administration contended that Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)” and that the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.”
“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 State Department fact sheet said.
It also said the Wuhan lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
The Biden administration has thus far not weighed in publicly on that intelligence.
Biden’s director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, testified before the Senate in April about COVID-19’s origins.
“It is absolutely accurate the intelligence community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially,” Haines said. “And basically, components have coalesced around two alternative theories. These scenarios are, it emerged naturally from contact with infected animals, or it was a laboratory accident, as you identified. And that is where we are right now. But we’re continuing to work on this issue and collect information and, to the best we can essentially, to give you greater confidence in what the scenario is.”
Biden also said Wednesday that “back in early 2020, when COVID-19 emerged, I called for the CDC to get access to China to learn about the virus so we could fight it more effectively” and claimed that “the failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Trump, recently said he believes the “most likely” origin for COVID-19 is a Wuhan lab escape; in March, he said one of the biggest problems “that affected our success in this pandemic was not being allowed into China” in the early days of the outbreak.
Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed, saying: “I think if we had sent our people into Wuhan and been able to talk to the Chinese scientists in a conversation that might have lasted an hour, you could have gotten so much information right from the get-go. … They would have told us, don’t believe what you’re reading, this is spread asymptomatically; it spreads highly efficiently, and it’s killing people.”
The former CDC director also told CNN that the scale of the COVID-19 outbreak was even kept from Dr. George Gao, the head of China’s CDC, until early January, with Redfield saying Gao cried after he discovered that “a lot of cases” were not from the wet market, indicating human-to-human transmission was occurring.
A September report from Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee contended a Chinese Communist Party cover-up and the WHO’s fumbling actions allowed the COVID-19 outbreak to grow into a deadly pandemic.
“Senior CCP leaders, including CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping, knew a pandemic was ongoing weeks before it was announced,” the House GOP report said. “By responding in a transparent and responsible manner, the CCP could have supported the global public health response and shared information with the world about how to handle the virus. It is likely the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented had they done so, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and the world from an economic meltdown.”
