China will face “isolation in the international community” if the country does not cooperate with further probes into the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, national security adviser Jake Sullivan told “Fox News Sunday.”
Sullivan praised President Biden for inducing his fellow G-7 leaders to put pressure on China to allow a transparent investigation of the pandemic’s origins.
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“What Joe Biden did in Europe this week was rally the democratic world to speak with a common voice on this issue for the first time since Covid broke out. President Trump wasn’t able to do it. President Biden was. He got the G-7 to endorse a statement saying in unison that China must allow an investigation to proceed within its territory,” Sullivan said.
“It is that diplomatic spadework – rallying the nations of the world, imposing political and diplomatic pressure on China, that is a core part of the effort we are undertaking to ultimately face China with a stark choice: Either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators in to do the real work of figuring out where this came from, or they will face isolation in the international community,” he continued.
Security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization team in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2021.
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
The U.S. won’t rely solely on China, however, Sullivan said.
“The president reserves the right through our own analysis, our own intelligence community’s efforts that he has directed and through other work that we will do with allies and partners to continue pressing on every front until we get to the bottom of how this virus came into the world,” he said.
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Biden was pressed on the issue earlier this week.
“China’s trying very hard to project itself as a responsible and very, very forthcoming nation,” Biden said at a presser on Wednesday. “They are trying very, very hard to talk about how they’re helping the world in terms of COVID-19 and vaccines and they’re trying very hard. Look, certain things you don’t have to explain to the people of the world. They see the results. Is China really, actually trying to get to the bottom of this?”
“One thing we did discuss, as I told you in the EU and at the G-7 and with NATO: what we should be doing and what I’m going to try to make an effort to do is rally the world to work on what is going to be the physical mechanism available to detect early on the next pandemic and have a mechanism by which we can respond to it and respond to it early,” he added. “It’s going to happen and we need to do that.”
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In May, Biden issued a public statement that said the U.S. intelligence community has “coalesced around two likely scenarios” for the origins of the pandemic, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” and asked for “additional follow-up.”
The president asked the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.”
Fox News’ Thomas Barrabi and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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