Lanhee J. Chen writes that President Joe Biden took an important step when he asked the US intelligence community to produce additional information, avenues of exploration and “specific questions for China” about the origins of Covid-19. But this alone is not enough if we want to uncover the truth.
The scientific research facility was known to have been conducting research on coronaviruses. The “lab leak” explanation, which was panned and dismissed by a number of analysts, gained new life after the Wall Street Journal reported on a previously undisclosed US intelligence report revealing that three researchers from the Wuhan lab became so sick with Covid-19-like symptoms in November 2019 — before official reports of the first outbreak — that they had to seek hospital care. The true origins of Covid-19 remain a mystery — one complicated by the recent escalation of geopolitical tensions between the US and China. To be sure, Biden took an important step when he asked the US intelligence community to produce additional information, avenues of exploration and “specific questions for China” about the origins of Covid-19. But this, alone, is not enough if we want to uncover the truth. The Biden administration should itself — separate and apart from the World Health Organization — lead a multilateral effort to investigate the origins of the virus. We should share our intelligence with other countries that are seeking answers, pool our collective knowledge about the origins of the virus and, together, place pressure on China to allow for access to the facilities and data that would help answer the remaining questions about the origins of Covid-19. The lab leak theory has been judged by at least one US intelligence agency as the more likely explanation for Covid-19’s origins, while two agencies think the virus was more likely spread to humans from an infected animal. Biden noted that the existing intelligence assessments were of sufficiently low confidence that neither the lab leak theory nor the one that the virus emerged from natural causes could be ruled out.
