there s also recent reporting that three wuhan lab researchers went to the hospital as far back as november 2019, shortly before the later confirmed outbreak. let s get into the facts. this is a big one and one that people are going to be talking about on this long weekend. i m joined by washington post reporter shane harris who has been covering the investigation into the origins of the pandemic. thanks for being here. you bet, ari, good to be here. thanks. let s fast forward to right now. based on the available public evidence, what are the most likely theories about where covid came from? well, there are two. and president biden said the intelligence community, as he put it, has coalesced around two. one, which i think is fair to say most scientists would agree with, is that the pandemic developed naturally when an infected animal carrying the sars-cov-2 virus infected a human and that human infected other people. we ve seen pandemics begin like that before, that s how the s
has not be liberals on a plan to wipe out student debt or the minimum wage in the senate. as some liberals have been arguing for years, the democratic party s base is fundamentally progressive on economic justice, and that base with its coalition is larger than the movement. and the new president biden increasingly sounds like he gets that, which means he sounds more like the party s progressives than, say, joe biden from the 90s. ceos make millions and millions of dollars, but don t ask us to pay more in taxes. on a multinational corporation that builds a factory abroad, they pay nothing at all. if elected president of the united states, we re going to do everything that we can to rebuild the trade union movement in this country. i m a union guy. i support unions. unions built the middle class. it s about time they start to get a piece of the action.
comment moderator, i have to say, there are ways to make sure that a comment section just feeds you what you want to hear. he could filter out troubling words like president biden or grand jury if he wanted to and just have all the comments at the top be something that s going to make him feel good. i feel like his followers also appreciate feeling like they have a personal connection to president trump. and just blocks of text on a page don t give them that. i m not sure if they ve decided they need that anymore. i m not sure if they ve coalesced around somebody else. but for now, i just think the block is sort of what the tiktok generation would call chugey. will you define for us? chugey is a word, if you re a new york times reader, you may have read about it.
sometimes called the kung flu. it colored everything. it s taken scientists time to come around to this idea that, wait, there have been lab accidents before, not that it caused a pandemic, but there have been viruses that escape labs, that does happen even in very safe labs, even in the united states. clearly president biden has persuaded, i don t think one theory is true versus the other, but that there s enough information that it merits going back over it with fresh eyes and saying, all right, take the politics out of this, take whatever donald trump said out of it. what does the information tell us and what can we conclude from it. and we may never get to an answer. but there should be a credible investigation, he s saying. i think you broke that down so well, it s really important, because on the one hand, if the chief and loudest advocate for something is a race-baiting liar who lies all the time and has done things to contribute to, for example, the rise in hate crimes, you c
officials are looking at previously unexamined evidence that might support this. president biden has ordered a better, deeper intelligence report within 90 days. top health experts including dr. fauci who had publicly downplayed the idea that it did come potentially from this lab leak, this theory, now says everything, informationally, has got to be on the table. we feel strongly, all of us, that we should continue with the investigation and go to the next phase of the investigation that the w.h.o. has done. so because we don t know 100% what the origin is, it s imperative that we look and do an investigation. that s how we feel right now. this is about science. it s about intelligence. but it s also about foreign policy and a notoriously adversarial nation, because biden officials say they are partly concerned that the chinese government has been stonewalling investigators, which raises questions about why.