President Joe Biden on Tuesday received a special classified report into the origins of the coronavirus, however the public will have to wait until a carefully vetted version is made generally available.
The Washington Post reports the investigation centered on whether the deadly pathogen jumped from an animal to a human as part of a natural process, or escaped from a lab in central China, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
In May, Biden told U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts in investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, including the possibility it emerged from a lab accident, and report back to him in three months.
The Wall Street Journal reports: “China has balked at U.S. and other efforts to provide that information, presenting the Biden administration with the same quandary—how to persuade Beijing to cooperate—that faced the Trump administration for almost a year. The extensive effort to press China for more information, some details of which haven’t been previously reported, ended in bureaucratic infighting and failure.”
The president was briefed on the findings of the report Tuesday, two administration officials told CNN.
The unclassified report could come this week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.
“I would say it typically takes a couple of days if not longer to put together an unclassified version to present publicly and obviously the President would be briefed first on any findings,” Psaki revealed at a White House press briefing.
Psaki continued: “So I don’t have an exact date for you, but I will expect it will be several days, a couple to several days after tomorrow.”
The leader of the intelligence community, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, flagged in June the possibility the agencies would not solve the mystery.
“We’re hoping to find a smoking gun,” she told Yahoo! News in an interview. But, she said, “it’s challenging to do that,” adding that “it might happen, but it might not.”
China has already responded even though it has no access to the findings.
The official news outlet Global Times on Wednesday published its own conclusions and called the Biden-commissioned report “artificial, political flavoring, not science.”
As Breitbart News reported, Beijing has already declared there will be no further examinations of the origins of the coronavirus in China, flatly rejecting calls by the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) for a renewed probe into the source of the virus.