A declassified report said a clearer answer would require more information from Beijing or new discoveries and reiterated divisions over natural causes vs. a lab leak.
American intelligence agencies are unlikely to be able to draw a firm conclusion about the origin of the novel coronavirus without more information from China on the earliest cases or new scientific discoveries about the nature of the virus, said a newly declassified intelligence report released on Friday. President Biden ordered the nation’s intelligence agencies in May to conduct a 90-day inquiry into the origins of the pandemic. When the key findings of that review were released in August, they failed to offer a single answer and instead reaffirmed the longstanding position of the agencies: The theory that the virus occurred naturally and the theory that it was accidentally created in a lab were both plausible. But the report on Friday reiterated that the evidence to support either conclusion was thin, and that U.S. intelligence agencies know far too little about the origin of the virus. The intelligence community has concluded that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon. Analysts “assess that a natural origin and a laboratory associated incident are both plausible hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans,” the report said. “Analysts, however, disagree on which is more likely, or whether an assessment can be made at all.” Four intelligence agencies, and the National Intelligence Council, consider the natural causes theory more plausible. One agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, backs the lab leak theory. But none of those agencies have delivered to the director of national intelligence or the White House a high-confidence assessment, which shows the doubt that continues to swirl around the question. The intelligence community has broadly concluded that the virus causing Covid-19 was not deliberately engineered in a lab. But even that conclusion is made only with low confidence. Some genetic engineering techniques make modifications difficult to identify, particularly given existing gaps in knowledge about the diversity of naturally occurring coronaviruses.
