The head of US intelligence said on Friday that there was no evidence the Covid-19 virus was created in the Chinese government’s Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with Covid-19 and may have created the virus themselves. Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community, the ODNI report said some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to Covid-19.
But the US “has no information” indicating they had done such work on the specific Covid-9 virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, or on any “close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.”
The report, made for Congress and carrying an unreleased classified annexe, came three months after lawmakers demanded a fuller explanation of US intelligence’s information on the origins of the pandemic which erupted at the end of 2019.
Some lawmakers allege that the virus was created out of so-called gain-of-function genetic engineering research at Wuhan and that Beijing had covered up evidence to show it was a man-made disease. Reiterating a conclusion announced in March, the ODNI report said “almost all” of its constituent agencies, which include the NSA, the CIA and the FBI, assess that Covid-19 was not genetically engineered and most believe as well it was not laboratory-adapted.
