Biden receives inconclusive intelligence report on COVID-19 origins

U.S. President Joe Biden received a classified report from the intelligence community that was inconclusive about the origins of the novel coronavirus, including whether the pathogen jumped from an animal to a human as part of a natural process, or escaped from a lab in central China, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter,  Washington Post reported.

The intelligence community will seek within days to declassify elements of the report for potential public release, officials said.

The assessment is the result of a 90-day sprint after Biden tasked his intelligence agencies in May to produce a report “that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” on the origins of a virus that has killed more than 4 million people globally and wrecked national economies. But despite analyzing a raft of existing intelligence and searching for new clues, intelligence officials fell short of a consensus, said the officials.

The debate over the virus’s origins has become increasingly rancorous since former president Donald Trump said last year that the virus originated in a Chinese lab. Efforts to understand the virus’s provenance have been complicated by Chinese authorities’ steadfast refusal to allow a more intensive inquiry by international investigators.

Biden’s directive came after he received a May report from the agencies saying that they had “coalesced around two likely scenarios” but had not reached a conclusion. He disclosed that two agencies leaned toward the hypothesis that the virus emerged from human contact with an infected animal, while a third leaned toward the lab accident scenario.