One day after Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra called for a “transparent, science-based” follow-up investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, President Joe Biden is asking the Intelligence Community to give him a report on the origin of COVID-19 within 90 days.
Noting that the U.S. Intelligence Community has insufficient information to conclusively determine of the origin of COVID-19, he has “asked the Intelligence Community to 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.”
In a statement, Biden lamented that “the failure to get our inspectors on the ground” in China “in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.”
The president said that he asked in March for his National Security Advisor to have the Intelligence Community prepare a report about the origins of COVID-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”
As of today, Biden said, “the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios,’” and noted that their current position is “‘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.’”
Biden pledged that the U.S. will 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.”
At a briefing Wednesday afternoon, White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did not say if the report would be made public but the administration will “have more to share after the 90 days.” Jean-Pierre declined to answer a question about whether there will be consequences for China if they do not participate transparently in any investigation.
Biden’s statement comes after other senior members of his administration have weighed in to the topic of the origins of the virus.
“Phase 2 of the COVID origins study must be launched with terms of reference that are transparent, science-based, and give international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak,” Becerra said Tuesday to members of the World Health Assembly.
Becerra did not mention China directly in his comments; the first human cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, China.
At a White House COVID-19 briefing on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said that “many of us feel that it is more likely that this is a natural occurrence,” as was the case with SARS-CoV-1, which went “from an animal reservoir to a human,” but added “we don’t know 100 percent the answer to that.”
“Because we don’t know 100 percent what the origin is, it’s imperative that we look and we do an investigation,” he said.
Andy Slavitt, the White House’s Senior Advisor for COVID Response, stressed at the same briefing the need for a “completely transparent process from China” in any investigation.
“It is our position that we need to get to the bottom of this, and we need a completely transparent process from China,” Slavitt said. “We need the WHO to assist in that matter. We don’t feel like we have that now. That’s a critical priority for us.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a separate briefing Tuesday that Biden “believes the Chinese need to do more to put forward data, to be more transparent, and in the second phase of this effort, he’s certainly hopeful that will be the case.”
Psaki on Monday said that the U.S. was calling on the WHO to support an investigation “free from interference and politicization” into COVID-19’s origins.
In a March report, a WHO-led team said the virus was most likely transmitted by bats to humans by way of another animal on the food chain. Introduction through a laboratory incident, they added, “was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.” That report generated intense criticism from some U.S. government officials who noted that WHO had published the report in tandem with Chinese officials.
Still, the lab-release theory is one that remains hotly contested – including by many infectious disease experts, who have cautioned that there is not nearly enough evidence to determine the virus’s origin. In a letter published earlier this month by the journal Science, 18 scientists advocated a “wait-and-see” approach. Without a follow-up investigation, its signatories argued, there is not nearly enough evidence to determine whether the pandemic was caused by an “accidental lab leak” or by natural origin.
“Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” the letter said.
“Most of the discussion you hear about SARS-CoV-2 origins at this point is coming from, I think, the relatively small number of people who feel very certain about their views,” Dr. Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and co-organizer of the letter, told The New York Times.
“Anybody who’s making statements with a high level of certainty about this is just outstripping what’s possible to do with the available evidence,” Bloom added.
Asked this week about the possibility of a follow-up investigation, WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told Reuters that their technical teams “will prepare a proposal for next studies,” that will be carried out and presented to the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, for consideration. He added that further origin studies will be needed in a “range” of areas, including on early case and cluster detection, the potential roles of animal markets, and food chain transmission.
Beccera’s remarks come one week after CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said in a Senate hearing that the lab-based coronavirus origin “certainly” was “one possibility,” but noted that most coronaviruses that have infected the human population “generally come from an animal origin.”
On its official website, the CDC states that while the “exact” origins of COVID-19 remain unknown, “we know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat.”
Spectrum News’ Breanne Deppisch contributed to this report.
