A long-awaited intelligence report on the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic is inconclusive, with agencies unable to reach a firm consensus as they found that both a natural origin and a Wuhan lab accident remain plausible.
Either way, the intelligence community said, “China’s officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of COVID-19 emerged” in late 2019, according to an unclassified document released Friday.
President Biden gave the intelligence community 90 days to investigate the source of the outbreak and report back to him after probes led by the World Health Organization received little cooperation from Beijing.
Four entities in the report had “low confidence” the coronavirus was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with the coronavirus or a virus very similar to it, while one entity had “moderate confidence” that the first human infection resulted from “a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses,” the two-page report said.
The Wuhan lab specializes in research on coronavirus found in bat caves. That raised suspicions of a lab accident, since the pandemic that has upended the world was first detected in Wuhan in the final months of 2019.
Intelligence reports found workers at the lab were hospitalized with a respiratory illness on the cusp of the public outbreak.
The new report says some entities within the intelligence community could not coalesce around either the natural or lab theory. They said they would need new information, such as clinical samples, to make progress but the communist government in China continues to stymie them.
Mr. Biden echoed those calls in a statement on the report.
“We must have a full and transparent accounting of this global tragedy. Nothing less is acceptable,” he said.
“While this review has concluded, our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest,” Mr. Biden said. “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again.
“Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China,” he added, “yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it. To this day, the PRC continues to reject calls for transparency and withhold information, even as the toll of this pandemic continues to rise.”
COVID-19 has caused over 630,000 deaths in the U.S. and over 4 million worldwide.
Former President Trump frequently pointed the finger at China as he dealt with the pandemic during the final year of his term, dubbing the virus the “Kung flu” to the chagrin of Asian Americans. He says China should pay massive reparations to the world.
Mr. Biden, in turn, has suggested Mr. Trump didn’t do enough early in the outbreak to try to stop its spread.
“We needed this information rapidly, from the PRC, while the pandemic was still new,” the president said Friday.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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