Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a visit to the institute in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021.
Hector Retamal | AFP | Getty Images
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced that he has ordered a closer intelligence review of what he said were two equally plausible scenarios of the origins of the covid-19 pandemic.
“As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has “coalesced around two likely scenarios” but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” Biden said in a statement.
“Here is their current position: ‘while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,” said the president.
Biden revealed that earlier this year he had tasked the Intelligence Community with preparing “a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”
Biden said he received the report earlier this month and then requested additional follow-up.
White House officials told reporters Tuesday that China hasn’t been “completely transparent” in the global investigation into the origins of Covid-19, and that a full investigation is needed to determine whether the virus that’s killed almost 3.5 million people came from nature or a lab.
“We need to get to the bottom of this, whatever the answer may be,” White House senior covid-19 advisor Andy Slavitt told reporters at a covid briefing Tuesday. “We need a completely transparent process from China, we need the [World Health Organization] to assist in that matter and we don’t feel like we have that now.”
The theory that covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was initially dismissed by most medical experts and health officials as a conspiracy theory, but credible scientists continue to question the true origin of the disease.
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