US President Joe Biden has tasked the United States' intelligence services with getting to the bottom of the origin of the corona pandemic. The previous investigations have delivered different assessments without conclusive conclusions, it said on Wednesday in a written statement Biden. Therefore, he had instructed the secret services to intensify their efforts and to submit a further report within 90 days. The United States worked with like-minded partners around the world to push China towards transparency and access to data.

Biden said that after taking office, he had already commissioned an initial intelligence report on the origin of the pandemic - including the question of whether the virus could have emerged through human contact with an infected animal or through a laboratory accident. He has since received this report. There are different assessments of the question within the secret service apparatus - however, there is a lack of information to finally evaluate the scenarios. The intelligence services should now collect and analyze further information "that could bring us closer to a final conclusion".

For a long time, unsubstantiated suspicions have been circulating that the coronavirus could have come from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan and may have been released in a laboratory accident.

The Chinese have so far vehemently denied such allegations.

The corona virus first appeared in Wuhan.

China had also denied a US media report in the past few days that three scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan had been hospitalized in November 2019.

The World Health Organization (WHO) came to the conclusion in a study presented in March that the virus could have its origin in pangolins as well as in bats.

The theory that it could have escaped from a laboratory, on the other hand, described the participating scientists as "extremely unlikely".