American intelligence assured in a report made public on Friday June 23 that it had no proof indicating that the Covid-19 had been created in a laboratory in China, without deciding on the origin of the pandemic.
Washington writes that it has no information to support the recently emerged claim that three scientists at the Wuhan virology lab were among the first to be infected with Covid-19 and may have created the virus itself.
The office that coordinates all of the American intelligence agencies (ODNI) writes in this declassified report that scientists from the laboratory have carried out genetic manipulations on coronaviruses close to Covid-19. But the United States “have no information” that they would have done this on SARS-CoV-2 or a very closely related strain.
Coronaviruses studied in the laboratory of Wuhan, with the Chinese army, “were too distant to have participated in the creation of SARS-CoV-2”underlines the document, which strongly rejects the hypothesis of a biological weapon.
Natural occurrence or accidental leakage
The ODNI, if it excludes the theory of genetic engineering, ensures that the various intelligence services are divided between two theories, and does not decide: a natural appearance of the pandemic, for example by animal transmission, and a leak laboratory accident. The majority of the scientific community favors the hypothesis of transmission by a wild animal.
The publication of this report intended for Congress comes three months after parliamentarians asked for more information on what American intelligence knows about the origins of Covid-19, which appeared in China at the end of 2019.
The summary report also attacks the theory that three of the scientists working on coronaviruses in this laboratory in Wuhan contracted Covid-19 as it appeared.
Washington writes that a few researchers fell ill in the fall of 2019, some with Covid-19 symptoms, some not. The intelligence community “continues to believe that this information does not confirm or refute any hypothesis about the origins of the pandemic, as the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by numerous diseases”explains the report.