Nearly 600,000 Americans and nearly 3.5 million people around the world have died of COVID-19 during the ChiCom Virus pandemic. That world total isn’t counting how many Chinese actually died — certainly several orders of magnitude more than Beijing’s laughably false number of less than 5,000. The pandemic (and response to it) has also caused untold economic upheaval, from lost jobs and livelihoods to endless product delays and rampant inflation. That’s to say nothing of the psychological damage to people who are still irrationally terrified of the virus. So, inquiring minds want to know more about China’s role in unleashing this hell on the world.

There are, of course, many who don’t have inquiring minds. In fact, they seem to want to help the Chinese communists cover up the truth. One such mind is that of President Joe Biden, and his deception and weakness is as much the story as China’s malevolence. He did, after all, win the election largely thanks to the Democrat Party’s effort to hang the entire pandemic around President Donald Trump’s neck.

Just yesterday, our Douglas Andrews recounted how COVID’s origins have been shrouded in lies, some of which have been perpetuated by the American president. Among Biden’s actions: Administration lackeys quashed an origin probe launched by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when they thought they could get away with doing so. The “solution” then proposed by the White House was to let the World Health Organization take the lead in any investigation. Of course, the Chinese toadies at the WHO had already bowed to pressure and obstruction, absolving Beijing of responsibility, and the ChiComs said this week that they’re done working with WHO on any investigation.

Yet there was a problem for Biden: The media was finally beginning to exhibit a little bit of inquisitive interest in COVID’s origins, so a day after the WHO play, Team Biden fell back on a new plan that he claims is an old plan — order U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate and return a report in 90 days.

“Shortly after I became president, in March, I had my national security advisor task the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” Biden said Wednesday. He added, “The U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question.”

Let’s assume for a moment that this is a real investigation. The questions we want answered are simple, if incredibly consequential.

The first is actually what Biden outlined: Did the coronavirus originate in nature, or did it escape in a lab accident? Those are not mutually exclusive, of course. Perhaps the natural coronavirus became part of gain-of-function research, or perhaps it was the modified product of a bioweapon program.

Furthermore, what role did U.S. taxpayer funding play in any relevant research? American funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology certainly would be a motivation for American officials like the all-knowing Dr. Anthony Fauci to deny, deny, deny.

Did the virus spread first via a wet market as the conventional “wisdom” has held, or was it released — again, whether intentionally or not — from a Wuhan laboratory?

Did the ChiComs, once the bug was out, develop a strategy to delay saying anything so as to use the impact to their advantage? Or did the ChiComs develop the strategy for their weapon first and then unleash it upon the world?

The theory that COVID originated in a Biosafety Level Four laboratory in Wuhan is not new, of course. The evidence is strong, if, at this point, still largely circumstantial. Senator Tom Cotton was among the first to advance it way back in January 2020, before the virus had even really hit the U.S. Trump and Pompeo also believed it to be likely. Yet they and every other person asking such questions were immediately labeled “racist” by the Left.

According to American leftists, thinking that Chinese scientists were studying a virus is racist, while thinking Chinese people visiting an unsanitary wet market and then spreading a bat virus isn’t.

The evidence for the lab theory grew much stronger just this week with the revelations about a Chinese mine dating all the way back to 2012. Six miners fell ill with symptoms very similar to COVID-19. Three died. Wuhan researchers collected samples of coronaviruses from that cave for further study.

“Wuhan is about 1,140 miles away from the mineshaft, a 21-hour drive by car, roughly the distance from New Orleans to New York City,” notes National Review’s Jim Geraghty. “The city of Wuhan is well beyond the natural habitat and natural migration patterns of bats who are most likely to carry viruses such as this one.”

Geraghty collected a veritable treasure trove of other information — about the cave, the miners, the lab and its research (as well as a mysterious period of zero cellphone activity from a high-security portion of the lab in October 2019), and Chinese efforts to obstruct investigators and punish truth-tellers after the pandemic began. As Geraghty admits, much of the evidence is circumstantial, but it is more than persuasive. To deny a nefarious ChiCom role in the origin and spread of this terrible virus is to be deliberately blind to reality.

We believe there’s little doubt of the answer to one of our questions: The ChiComs absolutely used the release of the virus, whether accidental or deliberate, to their advantage in weakening geopolitical foes like the United States.

A new and “America Worst” president with a history of being beholden to Beijing is only helping them. China never had an adversary quite like Donald Trump. And it’s never had an American friend quite like Joe Biden.

Indeed, we suspect this U.S. intelligence probe is Biden’s way of doing everything he can to not challenge China. As long as he’s in charge of the U.S. investigation, we can surmise the truth but may never definitively know the answers.

(Updated.)