As the world is trying hard to emerge unscathed from COVID-19 pandemic, the US has displayed its hard-line approach last week of May 2021 ordering probe over cause of this virus: from animal to man source or having born in a laboratory.
“I have now asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days,” Biden said in a statement, adding he had asked that specific questions for China be drawn up with input from US national labs. This, he remarked, while boarding Marine One in Washington.
“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,” Mr. Biden said.
A World Health Organisation (WHO) investigation concluded, earlier this year, that the lab leak theory was “extremely unlikely”. The US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told a WHO ministerial meeting earlier this week that experts should be given the independence to fully assess the origins of the virus.
“The US government has reasons to believe that several researchers inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) became sick in autumn 2019,” a State Department fact sheet said. The Wall Street Journal reported that three WIV scientists were sick enough in November 2019 to need hospital care.
“Now everybody is agreeing that I was right when I very early on called Wuhan as the source of COVID-19,” Mr. Trump said in a statement released in May. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, the US Senate unanimously approved two Wuhan-related amendments, the Washington Post reported. One amendment would block U.S. funding for virus ‘gain of function’ research and the other would prevent US funding for the Wuhan Virology Institute.
To this China has retorted: The US is “turning a blind eye on the facts.” China cited again the World Health Organization (WHO) study that laboratory origin of virus was “extremely unlikely.”
Looks like China is keeping its case buried under WHO’s statement and shying away from what the US has assessed. Global analysts summarise: Trump cited it aggressively and now Biden has given a go-ahead to its spies and other experts to crack the mystery.