Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he “was right” all along to pin the COVID-19 pandemic on China as the Biden administration called on the World Health Organization to begin a “transparent, science-based” investigation of the virus’ origins.
US Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on Tuesday urged the WHO to launch a second investigation into the origins of the pandemic as the “lab leak” theory gains traction.
Becerra said in a video message that the international organization must conduct a “transparent” probe after a widely panned initial WHO review controlled by China, which said the virus likely emerged naturally from animals.
“Phase 2 of the COVID origins study must be launched with terms of reference that are transparent, science-based and give international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak,” Becerra said.
Trump said in a statement, “Now everybody is agreeing that I was right when I very early on called Wuhan as the source of COVID-19, sometimes referred to as the China Virus. To me it was obvious from the beginning but I was badly criticized, as usual. Now they are all saying ‘He was right.’”
The pandemic’s epicenter being in or near Wuhan never was a serious point of contention, despite dubious statements from Chinese government spokespeople, but Trump drew fire for blaming China for the pandemic.
Trump did not specifically endorse the “lab leak” theory while in office, but he said it was a possibility.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that three employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell so ill that they were hospitalized in November 2019 — just before the first reported COVID-19 cases. The article cited “a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report.”
The Biden administration has been on the defensive about whether it’s doing enough to pressure China’s authoritarian government to be transparent.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Tuesday fended off questions at her daily press briefing from reporters about why the US hasn’t done more to get to the bottom of the pandemic’s origins.
Reporter Annie Linskey of the Washington Post asked Psaki, “Wouldn’t there naturally be quite a curiosity within the Biden administration that this could have come from a lab? Nearly 600,000 people have died and the president has shown an enormous amount of empathy for that. But, should this be the cause, it would seem that the United States would want to put some of his intelligence firepower on to that question.”
Psaki insisted that the Biden administration is curious, but that the WHO would be the entity to investigate pandemic origins, should China decide to be transparent.
“We need access to the underlying data. We need access to the information that the Chinese government has in order to make a determination through the international bodies that would do this investigation. And that’s something we’ve called for many, many times,” Psaki said.
“We’ve pressed with our international partners for the WHO to support an expert-driven evaluation of the pandemic’s origins. We would certainly participate in that with all of our research resources from the United States.”
Trump withdrew the US from the WHO last year, arguing the organization credulously accepted early Chinese data on the virus and failed to alert the world before it spread. President Biden unconditionally rejoined the WHO this year.
Psaki on Monday said the US has “no means” to confirm that the lab workers got sick in Wuhan, but that the US wants to find out more from China.
“An international investigation led by the World Health Organization is something that we’ve actually been pressing for for several months, in coordination with a range of partners around the world. We need that data, we need that information from the Chinese government,” she said.
The “lab release” theory has increasingly gained acceptance as a plausible explanation.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser and the US government’s top infectious disease expert, said this month that he’s “not convinced” the deadly virus developed naturally and called for further investigation.
Former CDC Director Robert Redfield said in March he believes the outbreak started at the Wuhan lab.
“I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory — you know, escaped. Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine,” Redfield said in a CNN interview. “Science will eventually figure it out. It’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect a laboratory worker.”
