WASHINGTON – Amid mounting speculation that COVID-19 may have leaked from a Chinese laboratory, US President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered federal agencies “to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer together to a definitive conclusion.” Biden, in a statement, told the US intelligence community “to inform me in 90 days” after receiving a report this month that he did not have a definitive conclusion. “It will be another effort by the entire government … by our national laboratories and other agencies,” White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters shortly after the president’s statement was released. US officials have emphasized for months that the government’s lack of cooperation in Beijing hampers external efforts to learn more about the origins of the coronavirus that has killed at least 3.4 million people worldwide, including nearly 600,000 in the United States. USA. The Wall Street Journal cited a US intelligence report on Monday according to which researchers at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, fell ill in November 2019, a month before the Chinese government reported to the World Organization of the Salud the first cases of the disease that would be designated as COVID. -19. “The fact that our inspectors are not on the ground in those first few months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19,” Biden said in his statement.
“It is highly likely that it is a naturally occurring virus, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of laboratory accident,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told lawmakers from the Senate at a hearing. The WHO, which will carry out the second phase of an investigation into the origins of the virus, has faced mounting criticism for ruling out the possibility that the new coronavirus has escaped from Chinese scientific facilities, an assumption that Beijing officials have repeatedly rejected it as false. Two months ago, the organization concluded in a report that it was “extremely unlikely” that COVID-19 had escaped from the Wuhan laboratory. Collins told senators that the report “did not satisfy anybody” and “this time we need a really expert-driven, unconstrained collection of information, which is the way most of the time we are going to find out what happened.”
Some Republican lawmakers in Washington argue that the WHO is not up to the task of determining the origin of the virus, in part because China has undue influence over the organization. “Can we agree that if you take [Chinese] President Xi Jinping and turn him upside down and shake him up, the World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?” Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, during a hearing “I don’t think I can answer that, sir,” Fauci responded. “Phase two of the study of the origins of COVID should begin with transparent terms of reference, based on science and that give international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the first days of the outbreak,” said the Department US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told the WHO annual meeting. Australia, Germany and Japan are among the other countries that have also asked the WHO this week to carry out a more thorough investigation. One of the reasons the United States rejoined the WHO was to hold it accountable, Jean-Pierre, the deputy press secretary, said during the briefing at the White House. “We have been very clear with the WHO to get to the bottom of this,” he told reporters. During his administration, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the WHO for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. In a statement Tuesday amid growing suspicion that the virus may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory, Trump said: “Now everyone agrees that he was right when I named Wuhan early on as the source of COVID-19, sometimes referred to as the China Virus. To me, it was obvious from the start, but I was heavily criticized, as usual. “
