On Day 126, Joe Biden admitted that U.S. intelligence is investigating the so-called “conspiracy theory” about possible lab origin of COVID-19—and bizarrely suggested that it was Donald Trump’s fault it didn’t occur sooner.
On Wednesday, May 26, President Joe Biden published a statement “on the Investigation into the Origins of COVID-19” wherein he painted himself as a stalwart, if thwarted, champion of putting Centers for Disease Control (CDC) inspectors’ boots on the ground in China when the pandemic began.
“Back in early 2020, when COVID-19 emerged, I called for the CDC to get access to China to learn about the virus so we could fight it more effectively,” Biden wrote. “The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19.” That’s right, it’s the last guy’s fault we didn’t do this sooner!
To jog the memory: Biden was at the time calling former president Donald Trump’s coronavirus response “nakedly xenophobic,” while claiming that with his outsized diplomatic prowess, he could strong-arm China into cooperating with U.S. health officials.
He falsely stated that Trump had cut CDC staff in Beijing to four employees, saying that Trump had “brought home the vast majority of them,” when in reality most of the cuts were Chinese nationals. When Trump lashed out at China, Biden accused him of “fanning the flames” of “hate, fear and xenophobia.”
“Nevertheless,” his statement continues, “shortly 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.” The president writes that currently, his intelligence community has only expressed low to moderate confidence in either the “human contact with an infected animal” or “laboratory accident” scenario.
The statement fails to mention that when Biden took office, he immediately terminated a probe originally led by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo into the Wuhan Institute of Virology for its potential role in spawning in COVID-19.
The “lab leak” theory was treated with near-comprehensive ridicule as a hoax or conspiracy theory by the mainstream media, with some outlets even allowing Chinese Communist Party entities to supposedly debunk the claim. (“Beijing says the claims are ‘insane,'” the Guardian reported in May 2020.)
On the heels of this statement, the White House sent out not their top spokesperson, but rather, deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to field questions. Jean-Pierre answered every question about the investigation or China’s cooperation with some iteration of “We’ll have more to share after the 90 days.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci said in 2020 that the evidence, to him, was “very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” adding, “I don’t get what they’re talking about… I don’t spend a lot of time going in on this circular argument.” Fauci now says “I am not convinced” that the virus occurred naturally, attracting the ire of Chinese state-run media.
In an interview Tuesday with Fox Nation host Dan Bongino, Trump said, “I have very little doubt it came from the lab.”
