Biden Focuses on Investigating the Origins of the Coronavirus, Adding Pressure to WHO to Investigate More Aggressively

President Joe Biden of the United States has issued a deadline of 90 days for intelligence agencies to come “closer to a definitive conclusion” on the origins of the coronavirus.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is under the renewed demand of finding out the answer as to how and where the coronavirus began. 

Biden has made a new call for an ambitious, worldwide investigation amid a surge of interest in theories about how the virus could have been initially leaked from the lab.

Federal health officials in the United States have said that Biden’s initiative was partly created due to dismissive remarks about an investigation made by a Chinese official at a WHO event on Tuesday.

The WHO, an overstretched United States agency responsible for the international response to the current pandemic, has gained a significant amount of pressure on its shoulders to investigate aggressively and do whatever it can to gain more in-depth information about the virus’s origin.

WHO emergencies chief, Mike Ryan, said on Friday that the organization was currently still discussing how they would proceed with this investigation with a team of experts that visited the virus’s initial epicenter of Wuhan, China. All hypotheses remain open, he says.

He added, however, that politicalized blame games have interfered with their consultations. “This whole process is being poisoned by politics,” Ryan said.

“I do feel like investigating into it (the origins of COVID-19) may help find something that could possibly slow down or even end the pandemic,” says Sydney Taylor, a sophomore at AISG.

“I think more countries getting involved might make finding the origins easier,” Sydney continues. “Finding the origins might raise more tensions. Even if the disease isn’t government-related, the west usually points fingers at China even when the country as a whole hasn’t done anything.”

“Either way, whether or not China decides to go through with the investigation, there are going to be rising tensions,” says Sydney.

Biden stated on Wednesday at The World Health Assembly, addressing how an in-depth investigation such as the one he is initiating should come from an international body such as WHO.

Chinese officials at the event, however, resisted the new calls for the investigation. One Chinese official at the assembly said that China has done the investigation work needed and that WHO should place its focus elsewhere.

“It is like poking China in the eye,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior official for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Before last year’s WHO Assembly, Australia had proposed a full, independent investigation into the virus’s origins, which was met with strong opposition from China. It was replaced with a compromise of a joint China-WHO study that passed the assembly.

At the assembly on Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra carefully and subtly directed his words not at WHO, but Beijing. International experts should be given “the independence to assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak,” he said, referencing the restrictions placed on the 17 international experts who traveled to Wuhan early this year.

A more aggressive investigation into the origins of COVID-19 does have its limitations, one of them being the potential disruption of the travel and gathering restrictions in different countries.

Giving a huge international organization even more freedom to investigate around the world, especially in the most populated country in the world, holds the risks of both spreading the virus even more and politicize the already stressful and dire situation.