Facebook halts ban on COVID-19 conspiracies

• Facebook has said it will no longer ban posts claiming COVID-19 was man-made, amid growing calls for China to fully investigate whether the virus escaped from a virology laboratory.

The social media company, which had been blocking what it called “harmful misinformation” on the virus from its website, said the decision responded to the “ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19” and came after “consultation with public health experts.”

The findings have reinvigorated the debate about the Wuhan lab-leak theory, once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory.

Questions are now being asked about China’s lack of transparency on how the virus spread and this week it was reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were admitted to hospital in late 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID.

Joe Biden, the U.S. President, Wednesday ordered his intelligence agencies to report to him in the next three months on the origins of COVID-19, which was initially identified as having emerged from an animal source in the city of Wuhan.

China, which has repeatedly denied the claims of a laboratory leak, rejected Biden’s calls for a new investigation into the pandemic, accusing his administration of “playing politics.”

Zhao Lijian, foreign ministry spokesperson, said Biden’s order showed the U.S. “does not care about facts and truth, nor is it interested in serious scientific origin tracing.”

According to Biden, U.S. intelligence agencies are currently split over the two possible sources for the virus that swept the planet over the past year, killing more than 3.4 million people.

He revealed that two agencies lean toward the animal link and “one leans more toward” the lab theory, “each with low or moderate confidence.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement Thursday saying it “does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially.” Assistant director Amanda Schoch said: “Either it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals or it was a laboratory accident,” but there was not enough evidence to say which was correct.