US President Joe Biden orders intelligence report on COVID origins within 90 days, asks China to cooperate
By Team Newsable | First Published May 27, 2021, 10:50 AM IST"The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of Covid-19,'' he added.
Washington: President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered US intelligence agencies to report to him in the next three months on whether the Covid-19 virus first emerged in China from an animal source or from a laboratory accident.
Biden, in a statement said the majority of the intelligence community "do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.
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He directed US national laboratories to assist with the investigation and called on China to cooperate with international probes into the origins of the pandemic.
"The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of Covid-19,'' he added.
The investigating agencies should "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," Biden said in a statement.
According to Biden, agencies are currently split over the two possible sources for the virus that swept the planet over the past year, killing more than 3.4 million people.
Biden's order signals an escalation in mounting controversy over how the virus first emerged -- through animal contact at a market in Wuhan, China, or through release of the coronavirus from a highly secure research laboratory in the same city.
The answer has immense implications both for China, which says it is not responsible for the pandemic, and for US politics, where the lab theory has been used by Republicans to attack Beijing.
"As of today, the US intelligence community has 'coalesced around two likely scenarios' but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question," he said.
In a statement on Wednesday, the White House said, "Getting to the bottom of the origin of this pandemic will help us understand how to prepare for the next pandemic."
Principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Back said in early 2020, the President called for the CDC to get access to China to learn about the virus so we can fight it more effectively.
"We are doing everything to understand this pandemic and prevent future pandemics. Importantly, we will continue pushing for a stronger, more multilateral investigation into the origins of the virus in China," said Jean-Pierre.
"We will continue to press China to participate in a full, transparent evidence-based, international investigation with the needed access to get to the bottom of a virus that has taken more than 3 million lives across the globe," she said.
(With inputs from agencies)
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