In May, Biden asked the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” within 90 days in hopes of finding a “definitive conclusion” of the virus origins.
The nation’s intelligence agencies assess that Covid was first exposed ot humans in November 2019 near the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province. The first known cluster of cases was first reported in December.
After the first case of Covid was reported in the U.S. in January 2020, the virus has since infected more than 38 million Americans and killed more than 630,000, according to Johns Hopkins University data. Globally, more than 215 million people have been infected with the virus and about 4.5 million have died, according to JHU data.
Earlier this week, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that it was still unclear whether the virus leaked out of a Wuhan lab.
“The vast evidence from other perspectives says no, this was a naturally occurring virus,” Collins said. “Not to say that it could not have been under study secretly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and got out of there, we don’t know about that. But the virus itself does not have the earmarks of having been created intentionally by human work.”
Collins added that the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origin of the coronavirus has been made harder by China’s refusal to participate.
“I think China basically refused to consider another WHO investigation and just said ‘nope not interested’,” Collins told CNBC’s Squawk Box.
In July, China rejected a WHO proposal for a second phase investigation into the origin of the coronavirus, which would include audits of laboratories and markets in the city of Wuhan.
“We will not accept such an origins-tracing plan as it, in some aspects, disregards common sense and defies science,” Zeng Yixin, vice minister of the National Health Commission, told reporters on July 22.
“We hope the WHO would seriously review the considerations and suggestions made by Chinese experts and truly treat the origin tracing of the Covid-19 virus as a scientific matter, and get rid of political interference,” Zeng said.
CNBC’s Rich Mendez contributed to this report from New York.
Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/27/covid-origin-report-us-intelligence-agencies-are-divided.html