In a stunningly short amount of time, President Joe Biden went from letting China off the hook to demanding U.S. intelligence agencies “redouble” their efforts to find the cause of the coronavirus pandemic.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that the White House would let the World Health Organization lead the investigation in China, and that the U.S. would stop investigating.
In response, he was blasted by Republicans and the term “China Joe” began trending on Twitter.
This is Joe & Hunter Biden landing in Beijing in 2013, a trip where Hunter vacuumed up untold millions from the communist regime in a corrupt business deal.
Ain’t no chance China Joe will now properly investigate the origins of COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/D4uCVHICgr
— BDW (@BryanDeanWright) May 24, 2021
On Wednesday, Biden did a head-spinning flip-flop and asked U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble” their efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the possibility that the origins of the virus trace to Chinese lab.
After months of minimizing the possibility as a theory, the Biden administration is responding both to domestic and geopolitical concerns about putting pressure on China to be transparent about the outbreak that has killed millions across the globe.
Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have said for over a year the virus may have emerged from a laboratory accident, rather than naturally through human contact with an infected animal.
Biden in a statement said the majority of the intelligence community had “coalesced” around those two likely scenarios but “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.” He revealed that two of the 18 intelligence agencies lean toward the animal link and “one leans more toward” the lab theory, adding, “each with low or moderate confidence.”
Biden directed U.S. national laboratories to assist with the investigation and asked China to cooperate with international probes into the origins of the pandemic.
“The United States will also 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,” he said.
Biden, however, held out the possibility that a firm conclusion may never be known, given the Chinese government’s refusal to fully cooperate with international investigations.
“The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19,” he added.
The Associated Press contributed to this article