By Yaron Steinbuch
The intelligence community was unable to reach a solid conclusion on whether the virus had jumped to humans via bats or escaped a research facility in Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
The intelligence community was unable to reach a solid conclusion on whether the virus had jumped to humans via bats or escaped a research facility in Wuhan.
A classified US intelligence report delivered to President Joe Biden was inconclusive about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the widely-pushed theory that the virus jumped from animals to humans — due to a lack of information from China, where the deadly bug emerged in Wuhan.
The intelligence community was unable to reach a solid conclusion on whether the virus had jumped to humans via bats or escaped a research facility in the central China city, two US officials familiar with the matter told the Washington Post.
In May, the president ordered intelligence agencies to produce a report “that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” on the origins of a pandemic that has killed more than 4 million people worldwide and wreaked havoc on national economies.
But after an exhaustive 90-day effort, intelligence officials fell short of a consensus, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the report is not yet public. They said parts of it could be declassified in the coming days.
When Biden ordered the probe, he said US intelligence agencies were divided over “two likely scenarios” — that the virus emanated from animals or a lab.
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