Biden orders 'unexamined evidence' that could show coronavirus leaked from China lab to be crunched by supercomputers at 17 elite research facilities
President Joe Biden has ordered the government's leading research laboratories to join the search for the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic by sifting through a massive trove of previously unexamined data, according to new reports.
Biden on Wednesday ordered the 17 National Labs run by the Department of Energy to assist the intelligence community in a 90-day sprint to examine whether the virus leaked from a lab in China.
The labs have been tapped 'because of their ability to crunch massive amounts of data' with their advanced supercomputers, a White House official told CNN.
The government is not revealing exactly what kind of data is being submitted for analysis, but experts say it is likely previously gathered intelligence such as signal intercepts or biological evidence.
President Joe Biden has ordered the government's premiere research laboratories to join the search for the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic
Equipment is seen at Livermore National Laboratory in California, one of the 17 National Laboratories to been called in to assist intelligence agencies in crunching data
Intelligence agencies regularly collect more raw data than their analysts are able to effectively pore through, and the application of advanced algorithms to seek patterns in the massive data set could offer new breakthroughs.
'We want the science to be a big part of this,' the White House official told CNN. 'We are going to use the full resources of our intelligence and scientific community to try to get to the bottom of this.'
Biden is also urging U.S. intelligence agencies and those of allies to hunt for new information that could shed light on whether China covered up a lab leak.
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, said the Biden administration's response was 'better late than never, but far from adequate.'
'Our intelligence community has been looking at this now for 15 months. They've done good work on it, but in the end the answer lies in the hands of Chinese communists, not people working for American intelligence agencies,' he told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
Cotton said that officials in Beijing have not been forthcoming about how the pandemic began. 'We should be insisting that they come clean, that they provide us a clear and unvarnished look at what was happening in the Wuhan labs,' he said.
Circumstantial evidence has long raised questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers were known to be conducting experiments on bat coronavirus strains similar to the one responsible for COVID-19.
Researchers are seen at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Biden's new 90-day probe will examine whether evidence supports the lab leak theory of the pandemic
Circumstantial evidence has long raised questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers were known to be conducting experiments on bat coronavirus strains
China insisted early and often that the virus did not leak from the lab, claiming that crossover to humans must have occurred at a 'wet market' in Wuhan that sold live animals.
Perhaps driven by animosity for Donald Trump, who embraced the lab leak theory early on, the mainstream U.S. media and academics heaped scorn on the possibility, calling it an unhinged conspiracy theory.
But new evidence, including reports of three workers at the Wuhan lab who fell seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, has forced a sober reassessment among doubters.
Frustration with China increased this week after Beijing said that it would not participate in any further investigations by the World Health Organization.
Biden rebuked China in his announcement of the new intelligence review, calling on allies to help 'press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence.'
UK intelligence agencies are assisting in Biden's new 90-day intelligence review, a senior Whitehall security source told The Telegraph.
The source told the publication: 'We are contributing what intelligence we have on Wuhan, as well as offering to help the American to corroborate and analyze any intelligence they have that we can assist with.'
British intelligence agencies have generally been skeptical of the lab leak theory, while Australia's spies have been more open to it.
While Britain and Australia already share intelligence with the U.S. as part of the Five Eyes partnership, Biden's new probe could prod them to redouble their focus on sharing evidence related to a possible lab leak.
Meanwhile, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise and more than 200 of his GOP colleagues have also called for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to direct her Democrat-led committees to investigate China's complicity in causing the COVID pandemic.
In a letter to the Democratic House Speaker, the Republicans said there is 'mounting evidence the pandemic started in a Chinese lab' and the Chinese Communist Party 'covered it up'.
'If that is the case, the CCP is responsible for the deaths of almost 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide. These questions about the CCP’s liability are not a diversion, as you falsely claimed,' the letter reads.
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