Blinken casts doubt about methodology of COVID-19 lab-leak report
09 June, 2021
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken cast doubt on Tuesday (Jun 8) on the methodology of a report on the origins of COVID-19 cited by the Wall Road Journal that concluded the hypothesis of a virus leak from a Chinese laboratory was plausible.
"I saw the report. I think it's on several amounts, incorrect," Blinken told a Senate committee hearing on the Point out Department's budget demand when asked about the Journal article.
The Journal on Mon cited people acquainted with a classified report by a US government national laboratory as saying it figured the hypothesis of a virus leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan was plausible and deserved additionally investigation.
The report said the study was prepared in May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and described by Talk about when it conducted an inquiry into the pandemic's origins through the final a few months of former President Donald Trump's administration.
Blinken said that to the best of his understanding, the statement originated following the Trump administration asked a contractor to check out the origins of the coronavirus that triggers COVID-19, with a specific focus on whether it had been a result of a lab leak.
"That job was done, it had been completed, it had been briefed, to relevant persons in the department. Whenever we emerged in, we as well were made alert to the findings," Blinken said.
"The Trump administration, it's my understanding, had real concerns about the methodology of this study, the standard of examination, bending evidence to fit preconceived narrative. That was their concern. It had been shared with us."
Blinken said the record was the task of one officer and a few individuals and not the "whole of federal government work" President Joe Biden has ordered, led by the intelligence community, to look into the origins of the virus.
Asked whether he backed declassifying information regarding the origins of the virus, Blinken said there must be "as many transparency as all of us possibly can with whatever information all of us find" subject to the necessity to protect intelligence sources.
In announcing his 90-day probe, Biden said US intelligence was considering two likely scenarios - that the virus resulted from a laboratory accident or that it emerged from human-animal contact - but had not arrive to a conclusion.
A still-classified US intelligence record circulated during Trump's administration alleged that three researchers at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology became thus ill in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, US government options have said.
Source: