On Sunday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation”and said that the world is “insisting” that China should cooperate as further investigations have to be carried out to find the origins of COVID-19. An earlier probe, conducted by experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) was unable to pinpoint the origin of the infection which has spread throughout the world.

Blinken said that the main reason   to find its origin was to ensure that proper policies and mechanisms can be put in place to prevent another pandemic from taking over the world as the COVID-19 one did so as well as to prevent another major outbreak.

The Secretary of State said that transparency, access for international experts and information sharing “has to happen” and that countries are coming together to insist that it happens.

Last month President Biden has asked the U.S. intelligence community to redouble efforts and investigate the origins of the virus. According to Blinken, after the recent G-7 summit, the Group of Seven leaders were calling for a “Phase II” study from the WHO to trace the origins of the coronavirus and to find out “how the pandemic started.”

In March 2021, the WHO reported that its studies on the origins of COVID-19 showed that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. However, some scientists and experts have raised doubts about the report.

A while ago, the New York Times broke a story saying that three workers from the Wuhan lab had been admitted to a hospital with symptoms similar to COVID-19 in November, much before the spread of the virus was confirmed by the Chinese.

The Biden administration later raised concerns about how sufficient information has not been disseminated and also about the lack of cooperation and transparency from China.

The Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that the U.S. government is working with the WHO and is working on the matter individually to understand what happened.