Outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, February 2021
(Thomas Peter/Reuters) An intelligence-community report on the question as summarized by President Biden just won’t cut it.
Some will find comfort in Wednesday’s news that Joe Biden has ordered the intelligence community to complete a review of COVID-19’s origins in the next 90 days. They should not. While a U.S.-led inquiry is an improvement on the prior approach of farming out the inquiry to the hopelessly compromised World Health Organization, the new Biden effort smacks of damage control. The choice of investigative tools is aimed at controlling what the public learns and how it is framed, rather than at exposing the truth.