Having led the call for an investigation over a year ago, and drawing the ire of Beijing along the way, Payne said U.S. President Joe Biden’s statement was “a welcome one.”
“I have asked the Intelligence Community to keep Congress fully apprised of its work,” Biden said.
He also said the United States would “keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence.”
This comes after the two prominent U.S. medical authorities, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), led by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, have indicated their consideration of the lab-leak theory.
Fauci told PolitiFact on May 11 that he is now “not convinced” that COVID-19 developed naturally, while Walensky said in testimony to the Senate on May 19 that it “certainly” was “one possibility” that the CCP virus could have originated in a laboratory.
The lab-leak theory was pursued by the former U.S. administration, with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking member of the Congress’s Intelligence Committee, stating on May 19 that there was overwhelming circumstantial evidence to support the idea the virus may have emerged from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
“By contrast, little circumstantial evidence has emerged to support the PRC’s claim that COVID-19 was a natural occurrence, having jumped from some other species to humans,” Nunes said, using the acronym for China’s formal name, the People’s Republic of China.
The Chinese regime has denied there is any truth in the Journal’s report. Instead, CCP foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian claimed the U.S. had released the CCP virus from Fort Detrick military base in Maryland, repeating a previous allegation that the novel coronavirus had come out of America.