COVID-19 originsU.S. Intelligence Community's Report Inconclusive on COVID-19 Origins

In May, the U.S. intelligence community (IC) was tasked by President Joe Biden to investigate the origins of CVID-19. On Tuesday, the IC delivered its assessment to the White House.

Parts of the report will be declassified and released to the public in the coming days.

The IC report is inconclusive, offering no definitive answer to the question of whether COVID-19 jumped to humans naturally, or was released from a lab. The IC report also does not offer a definitive answer as to whether the virus was natural, or lab-manipulated – whether by gain-of-function research or otherwise.

Experts say that the main reason for the inconclusive report is the fact that China has stubbornly refused to share important information which would have shed more light on the virus’s origins.

“It was a deep dive, but you can only go so deep as the situation allows,” one U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal. “If China’s not going to give access to certain data sets, you’re never really going to know.”

The pandemic has sickened more than 213.2 million people around the globe since late 2019 and killed more than 4.4 million, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. 

The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a report based on its own investigation, finding that the outbreak more likely began as an animal-to-human transmission. The report was criticized because some of the individuals involved in preparing it had ties to China’s research labs, and because it appeared to accept too readily the Chinese version of events, even though China failed to cooperate meaningful with the WHO investigators.