US President Joe Biden has hired American intelligence services to get to the bottom of the origin of the corona pandemic. The previous investigations have provided different assessments without conclusive conclusions, it said on Wednesday (local time) in a written statement by Biden. Therefore, he had instructed the secret services to intensify their efforts and to submit a further report within 90 days. The president revealed that the scenario of a possible laboratory accident in China - an accusation that his predecessor Donald Trump had loudly spread - is believed to be possible, at least in parts of the US intelligence apparatus.

The corona virus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019.

For a long time, unsubstantiated suspicions have been circulating that the corona virus could have come from a laboratory in Wuhan and may have been released by an accident.

Trump believed in the laboratory theory

Trump and his Foreign Secretary Mike Pompeo had repeatedly claimed in the past that they had evidence that the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan.

Trump had said that a "terrible mistake" may have occurred: "It was probably incompetence, someone was stupid." However, neither he nor members of his government presented evidence for the allegations.

The Chinese have vehemently denied the allegations.

China had also denied a report in the "Wall Street Journal" in the past few days, according to which three scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan fell so seriously ill in November 2019 that they had to be treated in hospital, according to US intelligence.

US intelligence agencies are at odds

The government of Trump's successor Biden has so far always called for further investigations into the origin of the virus and continues to do so.

However, Biden is now giving space to the laboratory accident thesis and is pushing the search for answers.

Biden said he had already commissioned a first secret service report on the origin of the pandemic in March - 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.

Two intelligence agencies tended to the first thesis, another intelligence agency in turn to the second.

However, there is a lack of information to finally evaluate the scenarios.

The intelligence services should now collect more information "that could bring us closer to a final conclusion."

The question of the origin may never be clarified

This cautious formulation also leaves open the possibility that there may never be definitive answers.

Biden complained that in the first few months of the pandemic - that is, while the Trump administration was still in office - US inspectors were not given on-site access in China.

This failure will "always hinder any investigation".

The US secret services announced in April of last year that they “agreed with the broad scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not made by humans or genetically modified”.

At the time, however, they also pointed out that they would continue to examine new findings to determine “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or whether it was the result of an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan”.

There are also great international efforts to find out how the devastating corona pandemic began. The World Health Organization (WHO) came to the conclusion in a study presented in March that the virus could also originate in pangolins in addition to bats. The theory that it could have escaped from a laboratory, on the other hand, described the participating scientists as "extremely unlikely".

However, the US questioned the quality of the investigation and asked for the investigation to continue. They accused China of unduly influencing the international experts involved. Beijing has controlled and restricted the investigations, so the allegation. The scientists would not have had access to complete original data sets and samples. The international experts only traveled to Wuhan at the beginning of the year after months of delay from Chinese agencies.