Fox News’ White House correspondent Peter Doocy confronted Joe Biden on Tuesday over whether he has spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about the origins of COVID-19.
“554,064 Americans dead from Covid-19. A lot of families want to know how this happened, how it got here. Have you had a chance to speak to any of your international partners– President XI, who I know you go all the way back with? Have you had a chance to ask him if these reports are true– that China may have misled the world at the beginning?” Doocy asked Biden.
“No. I have not had a conversation with President Xi,” Joe Biden claimed.
Fox News' Peter Doocy confronts Joe Biden on origins of COVID-19 pic.twitter.com/RQY8nn1hDg
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) April 6, 2021
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As reported by Fox News:
Biden’s comments come after the White House last month said it believes China has “not been transparent” in releasing its findings, as part of a report that it wrote in collaboration with the World Health Organization.
The report dismissed claims that COVID-19 had escaped from a lab in Wuhan and instead called the theory of zoonotic transmission, or transfer of infection from animals to humans, “likely to very likely.” Continued Below
The White House last week said the WHO’s China report lacks crucial information and provides a “partial, incomplete picture” of the virus’ origin.
The report calls the prospect that the virus transmitted from an animal reservoir to an animal host, followed by subsequent spread within that intermediate host that then transmits it to humans, “likely to very likely.” It calls the idea that the virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology “extremely unlikely.”
The report called for further investigation in every area except the lab leak hypothesis.
Even WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the research team’s assessment on whether coronavirus entered the human population as a result of a laboratory incident was not “extensive enough.”
