The Biden administration is largely adopting a wait-and-see approach on its opinion about the origins of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, ahead of the release of a report from the joint China-World Health Organization investigative team as some Trump officials argue that the most likely origin is a Wuhan lab.
The Chinese government worked to thwart investigations into the origins of the virus, which has killed 2.77 million people worldwide, officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said. The repeatedly delayed WHO-China report is slated to be released in the next few days.
Biden press secretary Jen Psaki was asked Friday whether President Joe Biden had views on the origins of COVID-19 and if the United States has reached conclusions on it.
She did not answer directly.
“The WHO is examining this and will be releasing a report soon,” Psaki said. “We’ll review that report once it’s available. We continue to learn more about the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its origins, so we can better prepare for future crises.”
When asked if Biden’s views would be informed by the WHO report, Psaki said his views would be informed “by his health and medical advisers, certainly, and so they’ll review — they will be, of course, the people reviewing the reports and more data when it becomes available.”
Psaki was also asked if the Biden administration still had concerns about the report, and she said those concerns were “in part because there was a lack of transparency and there was a lack of — we weren’t ensured that we would have access to the data available.”
The Biden administration was taking partial credit for the WHO’s decision to backtrack on releasing an early summary of findings from the joint China-WHO team, Psaki said in late February.
She was asked Friday what would happen if Biden was not satisfied with the WHO report.
“We’ve also called for an international investigation and look into what’s happened and the origin — not just the origin, I should say, the lack of transparency from the Chinese. We have reinstituted or reengaged with — through staffing of our team on the ground in Beijing,” Psaki said. “So, we’ll see what the report says, where we have concerns, we’ll look at the underlying data if we have access to that. And then, we’ll have to make a determination through an interagency process on what’s next.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Donald Trump, said COVID-19 likely originated through an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and hinted this occurred following gain-of-function research there.
“I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory. Escaped,” Redfield said. “Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.”
TRUMP CDC DIRECTOR THINKS COVID-19 LIKELY BEGAN IN WUHAN LAB
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top Biden health adviser, was asked about Redfield’s comments Friday.
“The issue that would have someone think it’s possible to have escaped from a lab would mean that it essentially entered the outside human population already well adopted to humans suggesting that it was adapted in the lab,” Fauci said. “However, the alternative explanation, which most public health individuals go by, is that this virus was actually circulating in China, likely in Wuhan, for a month or more before they were clinically recognized at the end of December of 2019.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who succeeded Redfield, noted, “We are looking forward to a WHO report that should be coming out soon that examines the origin of this pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 in humans, and we look forward to reviewing that.”
“The ledger on the side of an explanation that says that this resulted from some kind of human error, it far outweighs the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak,” said Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, in February.
He previously called the WHO-China investigation a “Potemkin exercise.”
Trump officials, such as former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have pointed to evidence suggesting that COVID-19 might have originated in a Wuhan lab.
“The jury’s still out,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in early February when asked if Chinese officials provided enough information for the WHO to form a reliable conclusion. “I wouldn’t want to be conclusive yet before we’ve seen the report.”
Price added: “Rather than rush to conclusions that may be motivated by anything other than science, we want to see where that data leaves us, where that science leaves us.”
“I don’t think there is any reasonable person who would argue that the coronavirus originated elsewhere” than in China, he said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in early March that “China has not been fully and effectively transparent, either at the start of this crisis, when it mattered most, or even today, as investigations are going forward trying to get to the bottom of what happened. And it is vitally important that we see real transparency.”
Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan released a statement in mid-February, saying, “We have deep concerns about the way in which the early findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and questions about the process used to reach them. It is imperative that this report be independent, with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by the Chinese government.”
“I also believe that we need a credible, open, transparent international investigation led by the World Health Organization,” Sullivan said in late February. “And they’re about to come out with a report about the origins of the pandemic in Wuhan, China, that we have questions about, because we do not believe that China has made available sufficient original data into how this pandemic began.”
Sullivan was asked if he was suggesting the WHO was being manipulated by China. However, he replied, “I’m not going to characterize it that way. What I am going to say is that the only way to have a scientifically based investigation is to have access to all of the data.”
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 the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses,” a State Department fact sheet released in mid-January noted.
“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 read, claiming that the Wuhan lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
Pompeo told the Washington Examiner on March 19 that was “a high-confidence assessment.”
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“This is why the WHO investigation has to be left to the scientists and the experts to lay out, without any interference by any government, because that’s the only way we’re going to know what the origins of this are,” Sullivan said when asked about that intelligence. “I’m not in a position to say how COVID-19 came into this world.”
He was also asked if he stood by the intelligence.
“No. I’m saying that I am not in a position, nor is the Biden administration in a position, to make a determination about precisely where COVID-19 originated,” Sullivan said. “And that’s in part because there has not been sufficient transparency coming from the government of China, and the WHO still has more work to do to get to the bottom of exactly where this virus emerged.”
While in Wuhan in early February, Peter Ben Embarek said a jump from one animal to another animal to humans was most likely and that an accidental lab release was “extremely unlikely” and didn’t merit further inquiry, but WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more studies were needed.
The Chinese government denies that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab and in the past has used Chinese diplomats to push conspiracy theories that it started with the U.S. military.
