China refuses to support the World Health Organization’s investigation into the root of COVID-19 caused the Biden administration to speed up the declassification of U.S. intelligence and the release of President Biden’s statement saying that officials are considering “two likely scenarios” that caused the outbreak of the pandemic, Fox News reported.
An administration official told Fox News that the president was informed of the intelligence in the Presidential Daily Briefing earlier in the month, which showed that U.S. intelligence officials are undecided between whether COVID-19 came from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.
The official told Fox News that the president, at the time, took the “rare step” to ask for the declassification of an item out of the PDB to share openly, stating Biden was trying to be open with the information U.S. officials have currently but also thought it was in the public interest.
But as the declassification of the information was proceeding, China declared Tuesday in a meeting of the World Health Assembly that it would not partake in or support a second phase of the World Health Organization’s investigation into the root of COVID-19.
China told the World Health Organization’s decision-making body Tuesday that it thought the probe into the roots of the coronavirus in its country to be final and that the international community should explore other countries.
The official told Fox News that China’s announcement sped up the declassification process and the disclosure of the steps the U.S. government is taking to solve this matter, despite the Biden administration publicly supporting WHO effort.
The official said it was a strange step for the administration to put out a midway report on what U.S. intelligence officials do and do not know, but said the move was justified.
Biden, who has asked for access to China to learn about COVID-19 origins since March 2020, released the rare statement Wednesday, revealing that the U.S. intelligence community has been discussing two scenarios for the roots of COVID-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” and asked for “additional follow-up.”
Biden claimed that the intelligence community “has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” but said that “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.”
The president asked the intelligence community to double their efforts to get data and analyze information that could help us closer to a final conclusion. Biden expects reports back in ninety days.
A source familiar told Fox News that the administration is not excluding scientifically credible hypotheses but is concentrating on the scenarios brought up in the president’s statement Wednesday.
The source wasn’t knowledgeable of current evidence supporting an intentional lab leak and instead emphasized the “laboratory accident” verbiage in Biden’s statement.
And an administration official told Fox News that the “focus” is making sure the intelligence gathered by the government is spread around as “transparently” as possible, without compromising sources and methods.
The official said the administration pressuring China, even as the U.S. undertakes a more intensive investigation, urging Beijing to open access to investigators and scientists, share underlying data and access to medical records of early patients.
The official stated that there is “no question” China is withholding information related to the root of the pandemic.
The White House has condemned the WHO and China for its “phase one” report for its lack of transparency. That report dismissed claims that COVID-19 had bee released from the lab in Wuhan and called the theory of zoonotic transmission, or transfer of infection from animals to humans, “likely to very likely.”
The report also said the idea that the virus may have been released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology “extremely unlikely.”
The report called for further investigation in every area except the lab leak theory.
China has promoted unconfirmed theories that the virus may have started elsewhere, or was even been brought into the country from overseas with imports of frozen seafood tainted with the virus, an idea rejected by international scientists and agencies.