United States intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report declassified on Friday said.The four-page report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the United States intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, however, and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic, Reuters reported.The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,& the ODNI report said.The report said that while &extensive work& had been conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute (WIV), the agencies had not found evidence of a specific incident that could have caused the outbreak.We continue to have no indication that the WIV's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic,& the report said.The origins of the coronavirus pandemic have been a matter of furious debate in the United States almost since the first human cases were reported in Wuhan in late 2019.United States President Joe Biden in March signed a bill declassifying information related to the origins of the pandemic.Biden said at the time of signing that he shared Congress& goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin of COVID-19.The debate was refueled by a Wall Street Journal report in February that the United States Energy Department had assessed with &low confidence& in a classified intelligence report that the pandemic most likely arose from a Chinese laboratory leak, an assessment Beijing denies.FBI director Christopher Wray said on Feb.
28 his agency had assessed for some time that the origins of the pandemic were &most likely a potential lab incident& in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
China said this claim had &no credibility whatsoever&.As of March 20, four other United States agencies still judged that COVID-19 was likely the result of natural transmission, while two were undecided.The post No direct evidence COVID started in Wuhan lab: US intelligence report first appeared on Ariana News.