Declassified Report on Origins of COVID-19: Animal or Laboratory Source?

2023-06-24 09:48:44

A long-awaited declassified report Friday from the US intelligence community on the origins of the coronavirus provided new details, but did not definitively say whether the source of the virus was an infected animal or an “industrial” event in a laboratory.

The report stated that there is no direct evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic arose due to an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

What did the report say?

The declassified 10-page report from the US Director of National Intelligence’s office said: “All agencies continue to assess that the origin of the virus from an infected animal or from within a laboratory remains reasonable assumptions to explain the first human infection.” The report revealed a “division” within the US intelligence institutions. While the National Intelligence Council and four unnamed agencies found that natural exposure to an infected animal was the most likely cause of the spread of the virus. As for the evaluation of the Department of Energy and the FBI, they indicated that the accident was linked to a “leak from the laboratory”, which is the most likely scenario for the first human infection.

The report did not reveal the cause of the pandemic

The report stated that the intelligence services still might not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, but they were unable to discover the source of the pandemic.

“The CIA and other agencies are still unable to determine the exact source of the COVID-19 pandemic, as hypotheses (both natural and laboratory) rely on significant assumptions or are challenged with conflicting reports,” the report said.

The agencies said that although they had conducted “extensive work” on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they had found no evidence of a specific incident that might have caused the outbreak.

Biological salah

The report argued that reports that several Wuhan lab researchers developed respiratory symptoms in late 2019 are also inconclusive, saying that some of their symptoms are inconsistent with those of COVID-19.

Almost “all” intelligence agencies agreed that the virus was not genetically engineered, and all agencies agreed that COVID-19 was not manufactured as a biological weapon.

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