“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,” President Biden said in a statement last week. “As part of that report, I have asked for areas of further inquiry that may be required, including specific questions for China.”
Biden went on to say that he also asked that this endeavor include work by other federal agencies to augment the intelligence community’s efforts. “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 added.
The question of the virus’s origin has been looming over public discourse since the pandemic began. Chinese wet markets received most of the early attention as a possible source, based on the world’s experience with previous viruses, and news anchors broadcast breathless accounts of bats and pangolins — some claiming they were sold as food in the wet markets — carrying viruses and passing them on to people.
Nevertheless, when former president Donald Trump, who lost the elections largely due to his handling of the pandemic, floated the idea that the virus originated in a lab in China, that notion was immediately dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory by the media. This makes President Biden’s revelation this week all the more surprising that shortly after he was sworn in, he instructed US intelligence agencies “to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19,” and in particular to investigate whether it might have emerged from “a laboratory accident.”
Create a free account to keep reading.
