The Central Intelligence Agency and another unnamed agency are undecided about whether virus has a natural origin or came from a lab, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news about the Energy Department’s position.
“Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told CNN last week. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”
Sullivan said that Biden had specifically requested that national labs under the Energy Department participate in the intelligence review of how the pandemic started. He would not confirm or deny reports about the Energy Department’s assessment that a lab leak was more likely.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, the former heads of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health, have maintained that Covid most likely spread from an infected animal to people. Such an animal has not been identified three years after the pandemic began.
House Republicans have called on Fauci, Collins and other former and current health officials to testify on the origins of the pandemic.
China has denied that the virus escaped from a lab. Foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning pointed to a World Health Organization report published in March 2021 that said a laboratory origin of the pandemic “was considered to be extremely unlikely.”
But the U.S. and 12 other countries sharply criticized the WHO report because the experts who wrote it lacked access to complete, original data and samples.
On the day the report was published, WHO Director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said all hypotheses of the pandemic’s origin are on the table and further studies are needed. Tedros called on Beijing last week to be more transparent.
“WHO continues to call for China to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct the necessary investigations and share the results to that effect — until then, all hypotheses on the origins of the virus remain on the table,” Tedros said a press conference in Geneva.
He also called on the U.S. to share any information it has on the pandemic’s origins.
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Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/covid-house-votes-to-declassify-intelligence-on-possible-wuhan-lab-leak.html