In a clear pressure tactic on China, US President Joe Biden has directed his intelligence committee to "redouble efforts to discover the origins of COVID-19". The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China is at the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic that broke out at the end of 2019, and the US was first among the major countries pushing the WHO to investigate whether the virus was the result of a lab leak. The Biden statement comes on the back of a Wall Street Journal report on Monday that claimed that three researchers from Wuhan Institute were hospitalised after they were rendered sick in November 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness”. The report quoted US intelligence sources.
"I have now asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days," Biden said in a statement. "I received a report earlier this month, and asked for additional follow-up. As of today, the US intelligence community has coalesced around two likely scenarios but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question."
Earlier, there were reports claiming that Chinese military scientists had allegedly investigated weaponising coronaviruses five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, and may have predicted a World War III fought with biological weapons, according to media reports referring to documents obtained by the US State Department. According to The Sun newspaper in the UK, quoting reports first released by The Australian, the "bombshell" documents obtained by the US State Department reportedly show the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) commanders making the sinister prediction.
US officials allegedly obtained the papers which were written by military scientists and senior Chinese public health officials in 2015 as part of their own investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Chinese scientists described SARS coronaviruses, of which COVID is one example, as presenting a "new era of genetic weapons". Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, several of which cause respiratory diseases in humans—ranging from a common cold to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).
-Inputs from agencies
