Biden’s announcement is the beginning, not the end, of a real covid origin investigation

President Biden took an important but limited step Wednesday toward a genuine investigation into the origins of covid-19. He issued an order directing his intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” to look into the two competing hypotheses about the source of the pandemic (a random viral spillover in nature or an accident at one of the Chinese labs studying bat coronaviruses in Wuhan). But this represents just one aspect of a growing U.S. government and congressional effort to finally try — as best we can — to get to the bottom of how the pandemic started.

Multiple senior administration officials told me that Biden’s statement, which came the day after China publicly refused to cooperate with further World Health Organization investigations, was meant to signal a new, broader phase of the U.S. inquiry. After receiving an initial U.S. intelligence community assessment two weeks ago as part of his President’s Daily Brief, these officials said, Biden decided to declassify some of it and send the intel community back to do more digging. But now he’s also including a range of other federal institutions.

Over the next 90 days, this investigation could and should examine any and all information on the Wuhan Institute of Virology held by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, including the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation. The list also includes the nonprofit organization EcoHealth Alliance, which channeled U.S. funding to the Wuhan lab.