President Joe Biden said recently he has asked U.S. intelligence officials to figure out why the pandemic started and more about the origins of the novel coronavirus.
Biden said the U.S. intelligence community had identified two possible scenarios or theories about the origins of COVID-19, including the idea that humans came into contact with it through animals or because of a laboratory incident in Wuhan, China.
- “As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” Biden said in the statement.
- He added, “I have now 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.”
Biden said he wants to find more “areas of further inquiry” in the hunt for information.
Biden’s call comes days after Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was “not convinced” COVID-19 was developed naturally, CNN reports.
- “I am not convinced about that, I think we should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened,” said Fauci, according to Fox News.
Fauci said a deeper investigation into the origin of COVID-19 is needed, according to CNN.
- “Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else, and we need to find that out. So, you know, that’s the reason why I said I’m perfectly in favor of any investigation that looks into the origin of the virus,” Fauci added, according to Fox News.
In a similar light, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, said there was growing evidence that COVID-19 started in a lab, as I wrote for the Deseret News.
- Gottlieb told CNBC: “People a year ago who said this probably came from nature, it’s really unlikely it came from a lab, maybe a year ago that kind of a statement made a lot of sense because that was the more likely scenario. But we haven’t found the true source of this virus.”