By Trevor Hunnicutt
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. intelligence community failed to resolve a sharp debate within the Biden administration over whether a Chinese laboratory incident was the source of COVID-19, U.S. officials said in a declassified summary on Friday.
The report, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to President Joe Biden’s request for an investigation, said a satisfying answer remains out of reach to the question of how exactly a virus that has killed 4.6 million people worldwide started.
“Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it,” Biden said in a statement after the intelligence summary was released.
Organizations within the sprawling U.S. intelligence community disagreed about the origins of the novel coronavirus. Several thought it emerged from “natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus,” according to the summary.
But they only had “low confidence” in that conclusion, the summary said. Other groups were not able to come to any firm opinion on the origins of the virus.
One intelligence community segment, however, developed “moderate confidence” that the first human infection with COVID was likely due to a “laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology” in China.
The report concluded that analysts would not be able to provide “a more definitive explanation” without new information from China, such as clinical samples and epidemiological data about the earliest cases.
For its part, China has ridiculed a theory that COVID-19 escaped from the state virology lab in Wuhan and pushed fringe theories including that the virus slipped out of a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2019.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Eric Beech and Tim Ahmann; Editing by Leslie Adler and Daniel Wallis)
