Republican lawmakers are claiming that the COVID-19 virus was the product of a research lab in Wuhan, China. The White House today is calling those Republicans irresponsible because there’s not enough data available to the U.S. Government to determine where the virus originated.
China isn’t helping either. The Chinese Communist Party-run government has stonewalled America since the outbreak of the pandemic and now, they aren’t picking up the phone when Joe Biden calls, says White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki.
When asked what she thought about the GOP claim of the virus being a lab experiment gone wrong, Psaki said Biden and the White House have no answer.
“Well, I think first I would caution you against disproving a negative there, which is never the responsible approach in our view when it comes to getting to the bottom of the root causes of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States,” Psaki said. “I will say that our view continues to be that there needs to be an independent, transparent investigation, and that needs to happen with the cooperation and data provided by the Chinese government. We don’t have enough information at this point to make an assessment.”
When asked why the President isn’t pushing harder on China, Psaki said they’re doing all they can, but Chinese officials refuse to cooperate.
“I would say that we have made that call publicly many times. We have conveyed that privately, and we have certainly communicated that they were not transparent from the beginning,” Psaki said. “That’s not acceptable. There’s an opportunity now in the next stage of this effort, for them to be transparent, to participate in an international investigation that can bring a conclusion to the origins and provide information that we, Republicans, Democrats, everyone in this country would love to have access to.”