No direct evidence Covid started in Wuhan lab: US report

Washington, June 24

US intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the Covid pandemic stemmed from an incident at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report declassified on Friday said.

The four-page report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, however, and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic. “The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the Covid pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,” the ODNI report said.

The report said that while “extensive work” had been conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute (WIV), the agencies had not found evidence of a specific incident that could have caused the outbreak.

“We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the Covid pandemic,” the report said.

The origins of the coronavirus pandemic have been a matter of furious debate in the United States almost since the first human cases were reported in Wuhan in late 2019. Reuters

Agencies divided

• The report said the US intelligence community had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic
• US intelligence agency still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, it said
• As of March 20, four other US agencies judged that Covid was likely the result of natural transmission, while two were undecided