The US intelligence chief has said there is no evidence that the Covid-19 virus was created in a Chinese government laboratory in Wuhan, reports RTE.
In a public report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said it had no information to support recent claims that three scientists at the lab were the first to be infected with Covid-19 and may have produced the virus themselves.
Based on intelligence collected by various US Intelligence Community (IC) member agencies, the ODNI report says that some scientists at labs in Wuhan have genetically engineered Covid-19-like coronaviruses.
But the US has “no data” to indicate it has done such work on a specific Covid-19 virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, or any “close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely related-enough to have been the source of the pandemic”, reports RTE.
The report, prepared for the US Congress and accompanied by an undisclosed secret annex, comes three months after politicians demanded a fuller explanation of US intelligence data on the origins of the pandemic that broke out in late 2019.
Some politicians claim that the virus developed as a result of so-called genetic engineering research in Wuhan and that Beijing has covered up evidence that it is a man-made disease.
Echoing a conclusion announced in March, the ODNI report said “almost all” component agencies, including the NSA, CIA and FBI, assess that Covid-19 was not genetically modified and that most believe it was not laboratory adapted
However, the ODNI report, like the March report, did not rule out the possibility that Covid-19 was being tested in a laboratory in Wuhan at the time and may have been accidentally released.
“The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases,” it said, reports RTE.
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