Biden receives report on origins of Covid-19

The director of national intelligence submitted a report to President Biden on Tuesday about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to US officials, but the country’s spy agencies have yet to determine whether the disease was caused by an accidental lab leak or whether it arose naturally in a flood of animals to Humans.

Biden had directed the nation’s intelligence agencies three months ago to write a report on the origins of the virus, which has been the subject of increasingly fierce debate, in part to give agencies a chance to scrutinize a hoard of otherwise incomplete data. exploited.

But the research, which examined data collected from the Research Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, the city where the virus first spread, has yet to answer the biggest outstanding question about its origin. Their lack of conclusions underscores the difficulty in determining the source of the virus, especially given China’s refusal to continue cooperating with international investigations into the origin of the coronavirus.

In the months following the outbreak of the epidemic, intelligence agencies began investigating how it unfolded. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pressured agencies to investigate the theory that the virus was created inside a Chinese laboratory and leaked by mistake. Pompeo formed his research group to study the question.

During the Trump administration, intelligence agencies rejected theories that the virus had been intentionally leaked. But they said they couldn’t draw a conclusion about what was more likely: an accidental leak from a laboratory looking at coronaviruses or a natural evolution of the virus.