Some lawmakers allege that the virus was created out of so-called gain-of-function genetic engineering research at the lab in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, and that Beijing had covered up evidence to show it was a man-made disease.
Reiterating a conclusion announced in March, the declassified report said “almost all” of its constituent agencies, which include the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, had assessed that Covid-19 was not genetically engineered and most believed as well that it was not laboratory-adapted.
But the ODNI report, as in March, did not dismiss the possibility that Covid-19 was being examined in the Wuhan lab at the time and may have leaked out through carelessness.
ODNI said the intelligence community remained divided on whether the pandemic arose from a natural occurrence of the virus – perhaps transferred from animals like bats – or from a lab leak.
The Wuhan lab had done pathogen research and vaccine development together with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “for public health needs”, the report said.
But the coronaviruses used in this research “were too distantly related to have led to the creation of Sars-CoV-2”.
It firmly rejected allegations that Covid-19 was developed by the PLA as a bioweapon.
The ODNI report responded to the allegation that three of the scientists at the Wuhan facility who were working on coronaviruses came down with Covid-19 around just ahead of the outbreak.
It said US intelligence found that several Wuhan researchers did become “mildly” ill in the autumn of 2019.
Some of their symptoms were consistent with Covid-19; other symptoms not consistent, it said.
It also said US intelligence did not know if those who became sick handled live viruses in their work.
“The [intelligence community] continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases.”
