Amid renewed debate over the origins of COVID-19 and the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory that the disease may have originated in a Chinese laboratory, President Joe Biden on Wednesday called on U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to uncover how the pandemic started, including the possibility of a lab accident, and report back with something “that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” within 90 days.
The Biden administration had maintained the position that the World Health Organization should be in charge of efforts to uncover COVID’s origins, with the Washington Post noting that White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated the president’s belief in “an independent investigation, one that’s run by the international community” as recently as Tuesday. But Biden the next day broke with that approach in ordering a fresh intel probe, a shift in federal messaging that comes a week after more than a dozen notable scientists signed a letter calling for an open inquiry into COVID’s roots. The hypothesis had been bolstered when the Wall Street Journal disclosed that, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report, three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology—the lab where it would have escaped from—became sick to the point of hospitalization in November 2019, which is around the time when medical experts believe the virus began spreading throughout the city.
Biden’s announcement shows the lab-leak theory, once treated by the administration as outlandish, is now at least seen as a possibility until more evidence is gleaned. On Wednesday, the president said the majority of the intelligence community had “coalesced” around two ideas of where the coronavirus came from—a lab accident, or naturally, from animal-to-human contact—but that officials “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,” according to the Associated Press. The president revealed that there was internal debate, as “one element” of the intelligence community “leans” toward the lab theory and two lean toward the animal connection, “each with low or moderate confidence.”
The lab-leak scenario, and its coverage in the media, has been particularly fraught due the fact that former President Donald Trump treated the theory as yet another way to blame China for the crisis, and conflated the possibility of a lab leak with charges that China deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon, a sinister and highly unlikely notion embraced by right-wing corners of the internet and amplified by Fox News. As such, “many mainstream journalists, though not all, dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis out of hand as a conspiracy theory,” New York’s Jonathan Chait notes, often treating it, along with the possibility of China withholding information about the pandemic’s origins, “with the same skepticism as Trump’s other lies on the subject, often blending different aspects of these claims together.”
Some journalists and news outlets have recently revisited coverage of the lab-leak theory, while Facebook reversed course on Wednesday, announcing that it will no longer take down posts claiming the coronavirus was man-made or manufactured “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a spokesperson told Politico. In doing so, the social media platform gave users the green light to spread unsupported theories about the virus being man-made or purposely released—neither of which, the Los Angeles Times’ Chris Megerian pointed out, accurately reflects the renewed attention on the lab-leak theory, which relates to the virus emerging from a lab accident. “We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,” the spokesperson said—yet, according to the Post, “some scientists cautioned that despite the renewed interest, no significant new information has emerged in recent weeks.”
The policy change comes mere months after Facebook, which has been a cesspool of COVID-related misinformation and conspiracy theories throughout the pandemic, expanded the list of debunked claims they would be removing to combat misinformation around the virus and vaccines—a list that included the claim that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.”
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