Of the many policy initiatives that President Joe Biden has taken toward China in his more than four months in office, two have been relatively low-key: the traceability of the new crown epidemic and the Beijing Winter Olympics. But perhaps because of the heightened interest in the traceability of the epidemic in the U.S. community, Biden has also had to shift from a low profile to a high profile on this topic, and has taken a rather transparent approach by adopting a written statement asking U.S. intelligence agencies to redouble their efforts and submit a report to him in three months.
Why is Biden taking such a high-profile approach to an issue that was once branded as a “conspiracy theory” and to which Beijing is so sensitive? First, the timing of the ongoing WHO conference has led to more discussion in the U.S. media about the traceability of the outbreak, with the Wall Street Journal on May 23 citing U.S. intelligence agencies as saying that three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virus Research sought medical treatment in hospitals in November 2019, months before Beijing announced the Wuhan outbreak of coronary disease to the public.
In fact, on Jan. 15, just five days before the Biden administration took office on Jan. 20, the Pompeo-led State Department released a fact check on what the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had done. The fact check said the U.S. does not yet know the origin of the virus. The virus may have arisen naturally from human contact with infected animals, but it could also be the result of an accident in a laboratory. The report concludes, first, to investigate the incident in which people within the Wuhan Institute for Virus Research (WIV) became ill. Because they became ill in the fall of 2019, this was before the first confirmed cases of new coronaviruses with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and common seasonal diseases. Please note: The last report from the Trump administration’s U.S. State Department had already told outsiders that the Wuhan Virus Institute had already had people get sick in the fall of 2019. But it did not then trigger the public outcry that the Wall Street Journal article generated four months later.
Regarding the seriousness of the aforementioned report by the U.S. State Department under Pompeo, this is what former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Bomen told the media on February 23, 2021: “That fact check by the State Department was a very carefully crafted statement. It was carefully crafted to avoid overstating the case made in the statement. The document was read by every branch of the State Department before it was released, and it was scrutinized by national security personnel, intelligence personnel, and Department of Health and Human Services personnel. Therefore, what is listed in the statement is not a series of hasty allegations.
In addition to the Wuhan Virus Institute having people get unnaturally sick in the fall of 2019, Bomin emphasizes two other important points of the report: second, to investigate the research at the Wuhan Virus Institute. Since at least 2016, Wuhan Virus Institute researchers have conducted experiments involving increased viral function, or RaTG13, and showed no signs of stopping before the COVID-19 outbreak; RaTG13 is the bat coronavirus that WIV identified in January 2020 as the closest to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar). After the SARS outbreak in 2003, WIV became the focus of international coronavirus research and has been studied in animals including mice, bats and pangolins since then.
Third, the secret military activities of WIV should be investigated. Despite WIV’s superficial resemblance to a civilian agency, the United States has determined that WIV collaborates with the Chinese military on publications and secret projects. Since 2017, WIV has been conducting classified research on behalf of the Chinese military, including animal testing in laboratories.
Also on Feb. 23, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his chief China adviser Maochun Yu published an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “China Lab Oversight Endangers the World,” which noted that in January 2021, the U.S. State Department confirmed that a mysterious illness had developed at the Wuhan Institute for Viral Research in the fall of 2019, and that At the same time, shortly after the outbreak in Wuhan, the Chinese Communist military sent generals to take over the laboratory, and even the Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s public speech on the outbreak emphasized that China’s biological material management and biosecurity system should learn from “flaws” and “lessons learned” from the “loopholes” and Xi’s call for a “new biosafety law” to become “part of the national security system. “The Biden administration has been working for more than four months on a new biosecurity law.
According to Fox News, the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance under former President Trump’s presidency has launched a probe into the origin of the new coronavirus under the direction of Secretary Pompeo. The report also shows that the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, under the direction of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has launched an investigation into the origin of the new coronavirus to determine whether the virus was leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. The Biden administration was briefed on the preliminary findings of the investigation team in February and March of this year, and decided to bring the investigation to a close, according to the report.
David Asher, who is in charge of the State Department’s new coronavirus investigation, said in a statement that, as the State Department said in a statement released on Jan. 15 of this year, along with subsequent data exposure and expert analysis over the past few months, the investigation found “considerable reason to believe that there is indeed a significant suspicion. He said he did not understand why the Biden administration was skeptical of a fair and accurate investigation into the origin of the virus, when more and more heavyweight scientists are now calling for an investigation into the origin of the virus.
Aysil has been involved in investigations into the flow of money from Pakistan’s “father of the nuclear bomb” Abdul Qadeer Khan, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and the top leaders of Al-Qaeda, but later Aysil himself was targeted by State Department officials.
According to FOSS News, the Biden administration has transferred the investigation into the origins of the new virus from the State Department to the White House National Security Council.
Perhaps in an effort to change the perception that his investigation into the origins of the outbreak was ineffective, Biden began his report Wednesday by saying, “Back in early 2020 when COVID-19 emerged, I called on the CDC to go into China and learn about this virus so that we could respond more effectively. The fact that our inspectors were not able to go to the field in those first few months will forever hamper any investigation that is launched into the origins of COVID-19. Nonetheless, in March of this year, shortly after I became president, I asked my national security advisor to task the intelligence community with preparing an updated analysis of the origin of COVID-19, including whether it originated from human contact with infected animals or from a laboratory accident. I received that report earlier this month and made a request for further follow-up.
Biden, who just received an updated report, immediately asked U.S. intelligence agencies to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information on the origin of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and to report back to him in three months on whether the new coronavirus came from an animal source or a laboratory accident. He also asked national laboratories and other government agencies to assist the intelligence community’s efforts. Biden also said the United States will continue to work with like-minded partners around the world to urge China to participate in the international investigation and to provide all relevant data and evidence.
It is worth waiting to see if the U.S. intelligence investigation machine will function properly and bear fruit under Biden.
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