Senior U.S. officials are investigating all possibilities for how COVID-19 made its way into humans and then spread around the world, the White House said Wednesday.
“We haven’t ruled out anything yet,” principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters when asked whether the virus may have emerged in a way that was “deliberate or not an accident.”
Top officials from the Trump and Biden administrations have been reluctant to say much about some speculation the virus was introduced to humans intentionally. The spokeswoman appeared to be mostly attempting to allow a new intelligence community review to be completed in three months. The White House has not yet responded to a request for clarification.
Officials from the Trump and Biden administrations have said China failed to share adequate information on the virus’s origins.
Jean-Pierre would not say whether President Joe Biden was prepared to punish China if the report determines that the virus came from a lab in its Wuhan region.
“We’re not going to go there just yet,” she said.
BIDEN CALLS ON INTEL COMMUNITY TO ‘REDOUBLE’ EFFORTS TO FIND COVID’S ORIGIN
Earlier Wednesday, Biden called on the intelligence community to “redouble” its investigation into the origins of COVID-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.” Biden also called on the National Laboratories and other agencies to participate in the investigation.
The president’s announcement followed a CNN report on Tuesday that the Biden administration ended a State Department inquiry into the matter that began under former President Donald Trump.
A former State Department official told the Washington Examiner that the Trump administration had pursued at least a dozen interagency inquiries into the virus’s origin and gathered intelligence to suggest the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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Nearly 600,000 people in the United States have died from the coronavirus since the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
