President Joe Biden ordered aides to find answers to the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19, saying on Wednesday that US intelligence agencies are pursuing rival theories potentially including the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.
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Intelligence agencies are considering two likely scenarios but still lack strong confidence in their conclusions and are hotly debating which is more probable, Biden said.
The conclusions were detailed in a report to Biden, who asked his team in March to detail whether the novel coronavirus "emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident," according to the president's written statement.
China's Embassy in the United States decried the decision, saying that politicizing the issue would hamper investigations into the origins of COVID-19.
China supports "a comprehensive study of all early cases of COVID-19 found worldwide and a thorough investigation into some secretive bases and biological laboratories all over the world," the embassy said in remarks posted on its website.
