The Department of Energy reportedly now believes COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese lab—but the intelligence community is split on its origins.
, making it the second U.S. government agency to adopt such a position on the emergence of the pandemic.wrote, citing sources who have read the new classified document, that the department had found with"low confidence" that the deadly virus could have emerged from a mishap at a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
The DOE was previously undecided on how the global pandemic began. The updated report was said to have been issued to the White House and members ofMembers of the U.S. intelligence community have come to different conclusions about the origins of the virus. A prior intelligenceof the origins of COVID-19, based on information up to the end of August 2021, gave three competing views on the matter.
An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China on April 17, 2020. Opened in 2018, it has been accused by some U.S. officials of being the source of COVID-19.It said analysts at four intelligence agencies had concluded, also with"low confidence," that the virus emerged in the human population likely through exposure to an infected animal, while one agency had"moderate confidence" that it was likely a laboratory-associated incident.
It added that three members of the U.S. intelligence community remained unable to side with either theory., that U.S. intelligence revised an assessment in January that year, in which it"judged that the outbreak probably occurred naturally" to include the possibility that the new coronavirus emerged"accidentally" as a result of"unsafe laboratory practices" in Wuhan.
The classified report, titled"China: Origins of COVID-19 Outbreak Remain Unknown," ruled out that the disease was genetically engineered or released intentionally as a biological weapon.
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