The Covid-19 virus is most likely to have originated from a laboratory leak in China, a US government report has concluded.
The US Department of Energy said it carried out the study on the basis of new intelligence and claimed its report - which has been provided to the White House and key members of Congress - can be relied upon due to the agency's scientific expertise and involvement in a network of US national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has also claimed that the Covid-19 pandemic can be traced back to a leak from a Chinese laboratory, but four other US agencies still believe the pandemic was the result of natural transmission. It is understood that the CIA is among the agencies that remain undecided, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Speaking to CNN on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, national security adviser, said the US intelligence community was split on the question. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other, and a number have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure,” he said.
He added that the Biden administration had “directed repeatedly every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources on getting to the bottom of this question", before noting that "right now there is not a definitive answer to emerge from the intelligence community".
The Wall Street Journal reports that the energy department reached its conclusion with “low confidence”, adding that the suggestions of Covid-19 being part of a Chinese biological weapons programme were unfounded. The FBI said in 2021 that it had “moderate confidence” that the pandemic was caused by an accidental leak from a Chinese lab. It is thought the federal law enforcement agency still holds to that view.
Other theories widely propagated include a focus on wet-food markets in Wuhan and the belief that animals could have transmitted the virus to humans. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence agency, believes the pandemic was caused by an accidental leak from a Chinese laboratory, reports The Telegraph. In 2020, he told the newspaper that he had seen a scientific report by a British-Norwegian team indicating that the virus was man-made.
The World Health Organisation allegedly shelved an investigation into the origins of the virus earlier this month. An initial inquiry by the WHO in 2021 determined that Covid-19 emerged from an animal spill-over event, but it later became apparent that investigators had been forced to report a lab leak was unlikely, to avoid tensions with China. Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that the blame for the pandemic lies solely with the Chinese.
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The latest report is likely to put pressure on President Biden to take a stronger line with the Chinese over the situation. In January, Mr Biden accused Beijing of under-reporting coronavirus deaths, but this was denied by the Chinese foreign ministry, which made assurances that the epidemic was controllable and that it had been engaging fully with the WHO on the matter.
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