On Monday, the foreign State Department said that Mr.President Biden has repeatedly discussed with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the need to identify the origins of COVID-19.

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EDITED BY |TONY WILD
WORLD NEW S -CJ JOURNALIST
28 FEB.2023 - WASHINGTON

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   the declaration following reports about a new intelligence assessment pointed to a theory saying that the global pandemic resulted from a lab leak in the Chinese city of Wuhan in 2019.

State Department Spokesperson Ned Price said the president and his most senior officials have pressed Beijing to provide more information and allow international investigations to take place unimpeded as part of efforts to determine where the virus originated.

U.S. government officials have been pressing to learn more about how COVID-19 originated since the pandemic first began in early 2020, with Republicans, in particular, suggesting it may have jumped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Wuhan, which is located about 500 miles west of Shanghai, is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.

Chinese authorities in 2021 refused to cooperate with a World Health Organization effort to study the possibility that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. Government officials have been critical of China’s lack of cooperation in determining the origins of the virus, arguing Beijing has not been forthcoming since the pandemic began.

COVID-19 has killed nearly 7 million people worldwide, according to data from the World Health Organization, including roughly 1.1 million people in the United States.