Politico reports:

President Joe Biden said Wednesday that the U.S intelligence community is split between two origin theories for the Covid-19 pandemic.

In a statement Wednesday, Biden notably did not detail the two theories between which the intelligence community is split. The president’s statement did note that he had ordered a review of the pandemic’s origins, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” but did not say whether either of those two scenarios were among the options considered to be “likely scenarios” by the intelligence community.

Biden said two elements of the intelligence community lean toward one scenario while another element of the community leans toward another, “each with low or moderate confidence.” The remainder of the intelligence community, which Biden said constituted its majority, “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.”

The president said he had ordered the intelligence community to “redouble” efforts to look into the situation to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” and report back in 90 days. That investigation will include “specific questions” for China, the nation where the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is widely believed to have originated, Biden said. [Continue reading…]

Politico also reports:

Support is growing in Congress for a probe of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, an effort that could pit Democratic lawmakers against the Biden administration as China hawks draw new attention to the theory that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab.

It’s not yet clear what form the congressional inquiry would take, particularly whether the Covid origin question would be part of a broader review of the global crisis and the U.S. response. But the ongoing discussions on Capitol Hill represent a remarkable bipartisan agreement that Congress should investigate the origins of a virus that has killed 3.5 million people worldwide, including nearly 600,000 Americans.

Democrats had previously dismissed the lab leak theory as a GOP talking point. But lawmakers from both parties are giving the scenario renewed consideration after The Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019 after developing symptoms consistent with Covid-19 — just before the virus spread across China. [Continue reading…]