President Joe Biden released a statement on Wednesday in which he attributes the uncertainty surrounding the origins of the coronavirus to the Trump administration.
“The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of COVID-19,” Biden said in the statement, pointing towards former President Donald Trump.
As increasing evidence has been mounting supporting the theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, the Biden administration has been criticized for not doing enough to ascertain the truth from the Chinese government.
Rather than owning up to a lack of urgency on the topic, Biden shifted blame from him to the previous administration.
To downplay his lackadaisical approach to investigating China, he continued, “…shortly after I became President, in March, I had my National Security Advisor task the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19.”
Despite claiming to have been on top of such investigations, the Biden administration recently shut down a Trump-era State Department inquiry into the origins of the virus.
Concerns over the legitimacy and quality of the evidence prompted the administration to kill the effort, according to three sources familiar with the inquiry, CNN reported.
Sources involved in the State Department effort, however, refuted that the work lacked quality and shared that their chief objective was to assess the scientific research and evaluate whether the lab leak theory was supported, undermining the Biden administration’s justification for stopping the effort.
Potentially narrowing into an alternative reason for the termination, CNN reported that there were concerns that the Trump administration was trying to ascertain evidence of China’s responsibility for the coronavirus leak to blame China.
By stopping this Trump-era research into the source of the virus while simultaneously placing blame on Trump for the lack of a definitive virus origin, the Biden administration has signaled that they still view former President Donald Trump as a bigger enemy than China.