WASHINGTON, June 21: The administration of US President Joe Biden will keep exerting pressure on China in order to investigate the origins of the novel coronavirus, and if Beijing does not cooperate, it will face isolation, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said.
“What Joe Biden did in Europe this week was rally the democratic world to speak with a common voice on this issue for the first time since Covid broke out. [former] President [Donald] Trump wasn’t able to do it. President Biden was.
He got the G-7 to endorse a statement saying in unison that China must allow an investigation to proceed within its territory,” Sullivan told “Fox News Sunday.” He said that Washington will continue imposing political and diplomatic pressure on China in order to get to the bottom of how the pandemic started.
“Either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators in to do the real work of figuring out where this came from, or they will face isolation in the international community,” Sullivan said. Biden recently ordered the US intelligence community to produce a report re-examining the origins of the novel coronavirus and to help determine whether the disease leaked from a lab or spread from an infected animal to a human.
China continues to call the laboratory-leak theory a conspiracy. In January, international experts traveled to Wuhan where they examined a laboratory, hospitals and markets for clues on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The expert mission of the World Health Organization (WHO) then compiled a report, saying that a leak of the new coronavirus from a laboratory in Wuhan was very unlikely.
The report, released in March, said that the new virus was most likely transmitted to humans from bats through an intermediary host. After the publication, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that China had withheld data from international experts during their visit to Wuhan.
Dr. Tedros said after the G7 summit talks this month that more cooperation and transparency is expected from China on the issue of COVID-19.
(AGENCIES)
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