The American secret service assured in a report published on Friday that it had no evidence that the COVID-19 was manufactured in a laboratory in China without deciding on the origin of the pandemic.
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Washington writes it has no information to support the recent claim that three scientists at the Wuhan virology lab were among the first to contract COVID-19 and may have self-generated the virus.
The Office that Coordinates All American Intelligence Agencies (ODNI) writes in this declassified report that scientists at the lab have performed genetic manipulations on coronaviruses related to COVID-19.
However, the United States has “no information” that it has done so with the COVID-19 virus itself (SARS-CoV-2) or a closely related strain.
The release of this report, destined for Congress, comes three months after lawmakers requested more information on what American intelligence knows about the origins of COVID-19, which emerged in China in late 2019.
The ODNI, when excluding the theory of genetic engineering, ensures that the various intelligence agencies are divided between two theories and does not decide: a natural occurrence of the pandemic, for example through animal transmission, and a leaked laboratory accident.
The coronaviruses studied in the Wuhan laboratory together with the Chinese army “were too distant to have been involved in the genesis of SARS-CoV-2”, according to the document, which firmly rejects the hypothesis of a biological weapon.
The summary report also challenges the theory that three of the scientists working on coronavirus in that lab contracted COVID-19 when it emerged.
Washington writes that in the fall of 2019, some researchers fell ill, some with COVID-19 symptoms, some not. The intelligence agencies “continue to believe that this information does not confirm or disprove any hypotheses about the origins of the pandemic, since the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by numerous diseases,” the report continued.
The majority of the scientific community supports the wild animal transmission hypothesis.