President Joe Biden said on Friday that China was hiding "critical information" about COVID-19 origins after the US intelligence community stated it didn't believe the virus was a bioweapon, but experts were divided on whether it escaped from a lab.
According to an unclassified summary of a widely expected intelligence assessment, the US does not believe Chinese authorities had awareness of the virus before the initial outbreak of the pandemic that has already claimed 4.5 million lives.
Biden said that China had blocked efforts to study the virus from the beginning in a fiery statement released after a three-month investigation. According to data revealed on Friday, US intelligence services are split on the COVID-19 origins but believe China's authorities were unaware of it before the worldwide pandemic began.
Biden vows to dig into COVID-19 origins
An unclassified report tells four intelligence services to believe the virus was first transferred from an animal to a human with "low confidence." A fifth intelligence agency believes the initial human infection was connected to a lab with "moderate confidence."
The virus was not created as a bioweapon, according to experts. As new variations emerge, the cause of coronavirus remains a serious public health and security issue, The Daily Telegraph reported.
President Joe Biden has promised to keep looking into the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic and has pressed China to provide "critical information" that has been suppressed. The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated an already tense relationship between the US and China, with Beijing accusing US officials of using the outbreak for political gain, as per Newsweek via MSN.
China, believing they were being unfairly targeted, stopped participating in foreign inquiries, and the origin of COVID-19 may remain a mystery without Beijing's cooperation. The most widely held theory was that the COVID-19 pandemic originated spontaneously, with animals passing the virus on to people.
Beijing vehemently blasts the idea that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak
One intelligence agency, however, had "moderate confidence" that the outbreak began when someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became infected. Some members of the Intelligence Community couldn't agree on how the pandemic started, either because analysts couldn't agree on the cause or because they felt both causes were equally plausible.
Beijing has categorically denied that the pandemic originated as a consequence of a laboratory accident and has chastised individuals who have raised the idea as part of an anti-China campaign. Hu Xijin, the editor of the state-run newspaper the Global Times, urged China to scale up its nuclear program after Biden requested the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to discover the source.
Per NDTV, the natural origin explanation - that the virus originated in bats and subsequently spread to people via an intermediate animal - was generally accepted at the start of the pandemic. As time passed and scientists were unable to identify a virus that matched the genetic profile of SARS-CoV-2 in bats or another animal, investigators became increasingly receptive to the possibility of a leak involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted bat coronavirus research.
Recent scientific publications, on the other hand, are refocusing the discussion on a zoonotic origin. "Animal-to-human transmission associated with infected live animals is the most likely cause of the COVID-19 pandemic," according to a report published in Science by researchers from China and the University of Glasgow.
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