Chris Lange, FISM News
President Biden on Wednesday said he pressed Chinese President Xi Jinping for answers on the origins of Covid-19 when the two leaders took part in a November virtual summit, despite the fact that his press staff never mentioned it.
During a Q and A with reporters at the Wednesday press conference, Biden was asked why he did not exert pressure on Xi to come clean about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, and whether his failure to do so was motivated by his son Hunter’s involvement in an investment firm controlled by Chinese state-owned entities. Side-stepping the issue of Hunter Biden’s lucrative ties to the communist regime, the president insisted that he did in fact press Xi when the two spoke.
“The answer is, that we did — I did raise the question of transparency,” Biden replied. “I spent a lot of time with him and he — the fact is they’re just not, they’re just not being transparent.”
Biden was then asked why his own press staff hadn’t been aware of such a discussion. A White House readout about the call made no specific reference to COVID-19, let alone its origins, but said the President “raised specific transnational challenges where our interests intersect, such as health security.” Beijing’s much longer readout of the call also did not mention COVID-19’s origins but included the following statement from Xi: “Response to any major disease must be based on science. Politicizing diseases does no good but only harm.”
“They weren’t with me the entire time,” Biden said of his staff, adding, “Look, I made it clear that I thought that China had an obligation to be more forthcoming on exactly what the source of the virus was and where it came from.”
The surprising statement follows two months during which the White House has refused to say whether Biden discussed the origins of the pandemic with Xi during the lengthy virtual meeting. At the time, over 760,000 Americans had died as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to CDC data. Today the number stands at more than 850,000. China has refused to respond to repeated inquiries as to how the virus began.
Ahead of the November summit, Biden declined to answer how he planned to elicit transparency from the communist regime concerning the pandemic’s origins.
In a subsequent White House briefing, Press Secretary Jen Psaki repeatedly declined to specifically say whether Biden pressed Xi on the subject.
“Well, I would say that the president’s push for the Chinese to … participate more, provide more transparent data and information, we’ve never held back on that front,” Psaki said. “We’ve argued for it publicly. We’ve argued for it at every level. And the president did talk in his meeting about the importance of transparency, which … this is exactly an example of.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a document titled “Updated Assessment on COVID-19 Origins” this summer indicating that one U.S. intelligence agency assessed, with “moderate confidence,” that the virus was “most likely the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” The report further states that four agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe it unlikely that COVID-19 was caused by “natural exposure” to the virus.
Several former Trump administration officials and House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans have long said COVID-19 likely originated from a lab leak, an assertion Dr. Antony Fauci has repeatedly denied, claiming the virus is “much more likely” to have had natural origins.