Pressed To Be Tougher On China Over Covid Origins, Biden Simply Smiles And Walks Away

President Joe Biden shrugged off a question from a reporter Wednesday about the role of China in the origin of COVID-19.

The United States officially surpassed 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 Tuesday. New York Post reporter Steve Nelson asked Biden if he had a statement on his responsibility for any of those deaths, and why he hasn’t pressed China to be more transparent on the origin of the virus.

Rather than answer, Biden smiled and walked away silently.

During the Trump administration, Biden regularly blamed former President Donald Trump for the hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths that accumulated under his watch. But the death toll from the virus in 2021 has surpassed that of 2020.

The administration has been largely silent in recent months on the question of COVID-19 origins, after commissioning a probe from the intelligence community on China’s potential role in covering up the beginning of the pandemic. The investigation represented a flip-flop from the administration’s initial position, which was to call for an international investigation involving the World Health Organization and the United Nations. (RELATED: Biden, G7 Offer No Real Sanctions To Back Up COVID Investigation)

Ultimately, the intelligence community probe produced little new information, and the Biden team has almost entirely ignored the issue since.