After Biden's push for probe into COVID-19 origin, China says US does not care about real facts

After the Biden administration asked the US intelligence community to "redouble their efforts" to come to a conclusion on the origins of COVID-19, China appears to be on the backfoot and hit back at the US saying that it does not care about real facts.

Speaking at a presser on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian termed the Biden administration's move as disrespect for science.

"Some people in the US completely ignore facts and science, do not pay attention to ambiguous parts of their own research and their failures in the fight against the pandemic, over and over making the buzz that a re-investigation needs to be conducted regarding China," Zhao said.

"This is disrespect for science and irresponsibility in relation to people's lives, as well as undermining global unity in the fight against the epidemic," he added.

Biden on Wednesday had asked the US intelligence community to "redouble their efforts" to come to a conclusion on the origins of COVID-19 and report back to him within 90 days.

"I have now asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze 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 the investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

"The United States will also keep working with like-minded partners around the world to press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence," he added.

Biden said that the intelligence community had already prepared a report at his request that analyzed whether COVID-19 "emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident" that he received earlier this month, but that officials did not make a definitive conclusion.

A senior White House coronavirus adviser on Tuesday said the world needs to "get to the bottom" of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic while adding that the WHO and China need to do more to reach the definitive answers in the matter.

"It is our position that we need to get to the bottom of this and we need a completely transparent process from China. We need the WHO (World Health Organization) to assist in that matter. We don't feel like that we have that now," said WH Covid advisor Andy Slavitt on Tuesday during a briefing.

A few days back, an explosive report by Wall Street Journal had stated that three researchers from China's Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care after they fell ill in November 2019, a month before Beijing reported the first patient with COVID-like symptoms.

"The US government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses," the report read, fueling debate of the lab leak theory.

The revelations come amid growing calls for a fuller probe on whether the COVID-19 virus may have escaped from the Chinese laboratory.

( With inputs from ANI )