President Joe Biden said on May 26 that the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) believes there are “two likely scenarios” that may have caused the CCP virus outbreak in China, noting that a significant number of officials believe the virus was spread due to a “laboratory accident.”
His statement, released by the White House, comes amid officials saying they don’t believe the virus developed naturally—contradicting the official narrative of the Chinese Communist Party, which has said the virus was spread through a wet market in Wuhan, Hebei Province, in late 2019. In recent days, a growing number of officials, including U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases chief Anthony Fauci, have suggested that the virus didn’t develop naturally.
“After I became President, in March, I had my National Security Advisor task the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” Biden said, adding that he wanted intelligence agents to “redouble” their efforts in finding the origin of the virus.
“As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” the president stated. “Here is their current position: ‘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.’”
Since the start of the pandemic, a number of Republican lawmakers as well as former President Donald Trump have suggested that the virus may have been developed in and escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a top-security laboratory located just miles from the aforementioned wet market.
