US intelligence agencies said on Friday that they had failed to find any direct evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from an incident at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Latest Findings
A declassified four-page report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said that although the intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility of the virus originating from a lab leak, it 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-19 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 teams of scientists had carried out “extensive research on coronaviruses, which included animal sampling and genetic analysis,” the agencies had not zeroed down on a specific incident that could have caused the outbreak.
The declassified COVID origins report confirms what we knew from the beginning: the only logical explanation is that the virus came from the Wuhan lab.
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) June 24, 2023
“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,” it stated.
Speculation
The topic has been the cause for major global debate since the onset on the pandemic in late 2019.
Chinese state-owned media house Global Times reported two years ago that according to the Chinese version of the WHO report, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, which was speculated to be the originating source of the virus due to the large clusters of infections that were recorded there in 2019, was not the original source of the outbreak.
The coverage did not specify the data that led to the conclusion or include any reasons or associated evidence for refuting the widely-believed wet market theory.
Another US intelligence report, released in the same year, had also claimed that three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in November 2019 and had to seek hospital care. The news had renewed speculation on whether the novel coronavirus may have leaked from the laboratory.