The federal government still does not know the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic but has not ruled out either a lab-based origin or “human contact with an infected animal,” the Biden administration announced Wednesday.
In remarks attributed to President Joe Biden, the White House released a statement Wednesday which said that the intelligence community has “coalesced around two likely scenarios” for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first scenario involves a human coming into contact with an infected animal, and the second scenario involves a “laboratory accident.”
The statement does not expand on what exactly a “laboratory accident” would entail. However, mere months ago, publicly entertaining any possible lab-based origin for the pandemic — such as through a leak of some kind — was well outside the Overton window.
While the intelligence community hasn’t come to a conclusion about the origins of the pandemic, Biden said that “two elements in the IC” lean toward animal-human transmission origins, while another element leans toward a lab-based origin. Each of these elements has a “low or moderate confidence” in the position, and “the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,” said Biden’s statement.
Biden said the United States will “keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation.” He also the intelligence community will report back to him in 90 days, with the goal of bringing “us closer to a definitive conclusion” on the origins of the pandemic.
Biden’s comments Wednesday come as the lab-leak hypothesis, once dismissed by the mainstream, has gained traction as an alternative to the animal-to-human transmission theory of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed more than half a million Americans.
Only two months ago, when former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield voiced support for the theory that the virus could have escaped from a Wuhan lab, The New York Times treated his comments with the utmost skepticism. A headline for a Times story reads: “The C.D.C.’s ex-director offers no evidence in favoring speculation that the coronavirus originated in a lab.”
It’s also not clear when the first person actually became ill with COVID-19.
The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. intelligence documents, reported Monday that three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers sought treatment at hospitals in November 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness” — a timeline that would conflict with China’s insistence that the first confirmed COVID-19 case could be traced to early December 2019.
In a statement to The Wall Street Journal about the three previously unknown cases of illness in researchers, a spokesperson for the Chinese communist government accused the United States of trying to “hype” the lab-leak origin theory, and suggested the U.S. was trying to cause a distraction.
This article has been expanded after publication to include additional information.
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Source: Dailywire
