Joe Biden gives 90-day to authorities to find COVID-19 origin

US President Joe Biden instructed intelligence officials to "double" attempts to "find" the origin of Covid-19, including the theory that it came from a laboratory in China.

He said the American intelligence community was divided on whether it came from a laboratory accident or from human contact with an infected animal. President Biden asked the groups to report to him within 90 days.

China rejected the laboratory theory "Smear campaigns and the shift of blame are returning, and the conspiracy theory of 'laboratory leaks' is re-emerging," the US embassy said in a statement on Thursday.

Since it was detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019, more than 168 million cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed worldwide, and at least 3.5 million deaths have been reported.

As for relative transparency in the US government, the Biden government has conceded that the US intelligence community is divided over the origins of Covid-19 - it could be the laboratory or contact between animals and humans - and no one is sure about that.

This is a major shift from the mockery of laboratory theory by many people in the media and politics last year, when Secretary of State Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Senator Tom Cotton and others, pushed the idea.

Pompeo did not help the situation because they were sensible about the grounds for their suspicion. And their theories drift along with more far-fetched ones, such as that the disease was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory as a bioweapon. The possibility still seems highly unlikely.

The public may never know the full truth about the origin of the virus, especially if China is still not cooperating. Biden promises a full investigation, and if the US finds conclusive evidence of a laboratory leak, it will mean that more than just a few prominent people will have to eat crows and assess their confidence in authoritative 'conclusions'. This could hamper relations between the US and China for many years to come.