President Joe Biden has ordered the US intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts in investigating the emergence of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and report back to him in 90 days, amid growing controversy about the virus’s origins from a bio laboratory in China. COVID-19 was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
More than 168 million confirmed cases have since been confirmed worldwide and at least 3.5 million deaths reported. The announcement comes after a US intelligence report found several researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalised — a new detail that fuelled fresh public pressure on Biden to order a detailed investigation into the origin of the deadly virus.
“I have now asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days,” Biden said in a statement on…