Editor’s note for Wednesday, May 26, 2021

My thoughts today:

The COVID-19 origin debate continues today, with the release of a statement from U.S. President Joe Biden, which says that “the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’” that the novel coronavirus emerged from either “human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident” but that a definitive conclusion could not be reached.

Biden then “asked the Intelligence Community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days.”

China is not going to be pleased, nor is it likely to be cooperative with any new American investigation, and it’s hard to see even the vaunted CIA being able to find anything new on the ground in Wuhan.

Months from now we’ll be no closer to the truth: No matter what really happened in Wuhan or elsewhere at the beginning of the pandemic, China will not allow an independent investigation and the rest of the world will remain deeply skeptical about the official explanation.

Our word of the day is family farm (家庭农场 jiātíng nóngchǎng).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief