State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the president and his most senior officials have pressed Beijing to provide more information and allow international investigations to take place unimpeded as part of efforts to determine where the virus originated.
“The President has raised this, the Secretary [of State] has raised this, the National Security Adviser has raised this, it’s been raised repeatedly and consistently at various levels because it is that important to us,” Price said of administration efforts to “impress upon the [People’s Republic of China] the importance of transparency.”
Ongoing questions surrounding COVID-19’s origins are a vexing irritant in the U.S. and China relationship, with tensions between Washington and Beijing newly roiling over the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon in late January, plus Beijing’s close ties with Russia amid its war in Ukraine and the risk of conflict related to Taiwan.
Price would not confirm a reported intelligence conclusion from the Department of Energy that assessed with “low confidence” that the outbreak of COVID-19 was the result of an accidental leak at a laboratory. It was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Instead, Price pointed to a “variety of views within the intelligence community” that have lent support to two of the main theories for the origins of the virus: the virus leaked from a lab — in particular, the Wuhan Institute of Virology — or was the result of animal-to-human transmission. Price added that some intelligence agencies have reached no answer.
“There are some elements within the intelligence community that have reached conclusions on one side. There are others that have reached conclusions on the other. There are a number of intelligence community agencies that have put forward an assessment that essentially makes clear they don’t have enough information to conclude one way or another,” he said.
Read more on the reignited firestorm over the "lab leak" theory at TheHill.com.
