Biden now wants the US intelligence to investigate the Wuhan lab leak and gives them 90 days to report back – after shutting down Pompeo-led probe into theory and dismissing Trump’s claims
- Once dismissed as fringe theory, growing number of scientists now say it is possible COVID-19 escaped from Chinese lab
- President Biden said he had told the intelligence community to redouble efforts to collect information that ‘could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion’
- He said intelligence agencies currently had insufficient evidence to decide whether virus leaked from lab or emerged in the wild
- And he gave them 90 days to report back
Biden has asked his intelligence agencies to step up their efforts to get to the truth about the origins of COVID-19 amid growing concern that it emerged from a Chinese laboratory.
A string of senior scientists have recently admitted they may have leapt to conclusions in assuming the virus jumped from an animal host in the wild to humans.
And at the weekend fresh details emerged about how staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital treatment for COVID-like symptoms in November 2019.
Biden defended his administration’s approach and said the intelligence agents were divided on the two possible scenarios: the lab leak or natural transfer in the wild.
‘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,’ said Biden.
‘As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China.’
He also directed national laboratories to assist with the investigation.
‘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,’ he said.
But he also said a final answer may never be found given the way that China refused to cooperate in the early days of the outbreak.
Even so, his statement marks a reversal for an administration that repeatedly expressed skepticism for the lab leak hypothesis.
In contrast, President Trump and his allies quickly pointed the finger at China as the pandemic spread.
In April last year, he said he had a ‘high degree of confidence’ that the novel coronavirus came from a lab and claimed to have seen evidence to support his certainty.
Yet on Tuesday it emerged that a State Department investigation into whether the Wuhan laboratory was the source of the pandemic had been shut down by the Biden administration.
Last fall, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lead an investigation to answer whether China’s biological weapons program may have played a role in the pandemic, sources told CNN on Tuesday.
And it comes as senior scientists admit they cannot be certain of the virus’s origins.
The initially pointed to previous coronavirus outbreaks, including SARS and MERS, which could all be traced to naturally occurring animal reservoirs as evidence of COVID-19’s origins.
But so far a natural host has yet to be found.
During a White House briefing on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top infectious diseases expert, said he still believed the most likely explanation was a natural transfer to humans but that a deeper investigation is needed.
‘Because we don’t know 100 percent what the origin is, it’s imperative that we look and we do an investigation,’ he said.
The World Health Organization released a joint report with Chinese scientists in March after a team spent four weeks in Wuhan.
But its findings were criticized amid concerns that investigators were delayed and lacked access to original samples.