The White House on Monday said that officials cannot draw a conclusion about the origins of COVID-19 without an independent investigation and more data from China.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are and we have repeatedly called for the [World Health Organization] WHO to support an expert-driven evaluation of the pandemic\u2019s origins that is free from interference and politicization,\u201d White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters at a briefing Monday.<\/p>\n
She insisted that officials would not get \u201cahead of an actual international process,\u201d saying \u201cWe don\u2019t have enough data and information to jump to a conclusion at this point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Responding to:\u00a0<\/strong>Psaki was questioned about a Wall Street Journal report that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology tried to get hospital care in November 2019, raising questions about whether the COVID-19 virus first appeared in a laboratory.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t mean we can draw a conclusion,\u201d she said. We don\u2019t have enough information to draw a conclusion about the origins. There is a need to look into a range of options. We need data, we need an independent investigation, and that\u2019s what we\u2019ve been calling for.\u201d<\/p>\n Background:\u00a0<\/strong>Scientists have said they believe it\u2019s most likely the virus came from an animal, with a previous WHO-led report concluding a laboratory origination was \u201cextremely unlikely.\u201d But the Biden administration and others raised questions about whether China influenced that report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The White House on Monday said...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35564,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35563\/revisions\/35564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}