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WASHINGTON, D.C., May 28, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — While Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have come out with one voice promoting an investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus, it has come to light that the State Department ended a months-long study earlier this year that was investigating whether the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

On Wednesday, Biden announced a directive to U.S. intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts” in investigating the origins of COVID-19 and issue a report within 90 days that “could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.” 

The announcement came a few days after a Wall Street Journal article revealing that three researchers from the Chinese lab became sick enough in November 2019 — “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness” — to seek hospital care, providing additional evidence of a viral leak from the lab.

However, as has been confirmed by Fox News, earlier this year the Biden administration discontinued a study on a possible origin of the virus — which was initiated by Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and conducted within the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance (AVC) — after a briefing of the team's initial findings.

Ned Price, a spokesman for the State Department, denied that the AVC study had been shut down, but indicated that “the team's work ended after delivering a report in February and March,” as Fox News summarized.

Price acknowledged the validity of questions about the origin of the virus in China, as did former Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non-Proliferation Chris Ford, who said, “The lab origin theory is very possible and China must be held to account.” Ford explained that he had only learned about the AVC investigation in December, and that he had “procedural concerns and structural concerns” with it.

Another source informed Fox News that AVC employed a single contractor to conduct this particular research, along with other topics, and that “the inquiry was closed amid concerns about methodology.”

Fox News identified David Asher as the contractor who led the AVC investigation. Asher defended his work and charged that some State Department colleagues at the time “were deliberately playing down possible links to China’s biological weapons program.”

“We don’t know for certain what happened in Wuhan, but we had every reason to investigate and ask questions,” he continued. “As the State Department's Jan. 15 statement said – and as additional disclosures and expert analyses of the last few months have underscored – there is probable cause for deep suspicion” that the virus originated at WIV.

Though Asher left the State Department at the end of the Trump administration, he did assist in the composition of a January 15 memo released by Pompeo that affirmed the WIV has cooperated on “secret projects” with China’s military since “at least 2017.”

Asher also asserted that the Chinese Communist Party clearly “engaged in a huge cover-up over the stealth ability of COVID to transmit human-to-human,” and continues to do so in not allowing outside national and international health officials access to information regarding the origins of the pandemic. 

In summarizing his team’s work at the State Department, Asher said, “In the last months of the last administration, we didn’t draw or assert any conclusions, but we worked successfully to reveal certain facts and raise significant questions about the clear plausibility of a lab leak origin” of the virus.

“This was a global public service,” he said, while also emphasizing he didn’t “know why the Biden team would doubt an effort to carry out a fair and accurate investigation into a subject that increasing numbers of leading scientists are now also calling to study.”

On the Wednesday broadcast of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host asked Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri why the Biden administration would shut down “a months-long investigation into the central question of the moment?”

Hawley replied, “I don't know why they canceled it, Tucker, except for maybe they didn't want the answer.”

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