Acting on his order of May 26 that it do so within 90 days, the intelligence community of the United States is expected to deliver a report to President Joe Biden identifying China as the origin of the novel coronavirus.

To make sure his message got across, in announcing the order, the president went so far as to single out China as a country that had "specific questions" to answer, vowing that the US is working with its allies to "press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence".

That said, although the composers of the supposed investigative report know what the end result should be, how to arrive at that conclusion is proving to be a mind-boggling challenge for them. Otherwise, insiders with close contacts to this undertaking would not have complained to the media recently about it being mission impossible.

Given the strengths of the US intelligence departments, which have been made well known to the world thanks to the bragging of Mike Pompeo, previous state secretary and former CIA chief — "we lied, we cheated, we stole" — it is inevitable that the report will arrive at the desired conclusion by hook or by crook. But even the best liars, cheats and thieves in the world cannot fill the gap between the evidence and the conclusion with anything that holds water.

The report on its field research in China for origin tracing the World Health Organization published in March, which says a leak from the virology lab in Wuhan is "extremely unlikely" to have been the source of the virus, should be taken as the authoritative conclusion on that conspiracy theory the US administration is pushing given the field study was conducted by experts. The report of the WHO team of scientists should also be the foundation for future origin-tracing efforts in other parts of the world, including the US, where the spotlight of suspicion falls most heavily.

That the Biden administration has openly questioned the integrity of the report and its authors, and threatened to hold the WHO accountable for it before instructing its own intelligence community to undertake the work only reveals its true color as a political speculator trying to exploit the pandemic for its own narrow ends.

By instructing the intelligence machinery of the US to undertake "scientific research", Biden has simply exposed his true intention is to secure another pretense to scapegoat China for the pandemic, and so deflect attention from the US' horribly failed response to the pandemic at home and the possibility it might be the origin of the virus.

The great lengths the Biden administration has been going to coerce the WHO to conduct a so-called second phase origin-tracing probe in China, and pressing other countries to align with it for a supposedly independent investigation targeting China as being responsible for the pandemic speaks volumes of its callousness in putting politics before science as well as lives.

It is almost predictable that the report on the origins of the virus the US intelligence community is to release by the end of this month will be another ugly and shameful show of the US administration's readiness to silence science for political ends.