US report says intelligence community is still in dark over COVID origins

US officials have submitted a report stating that the intelligence community has failed to resolve the debate over the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Biden administration has various opinions about whether a Chinese laboratory incident was the source of Covid-19.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that a satisfying answer to the question of how a virus that has killed 4.6 million people worldwide started remained out of reach, reported The Guardian.

President Joe Biden said that critical information about the origins of the pandemic exists in the People's Republic of China. He alleged that the Chinese government has worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it. "The world deserves answers and I will not rest until we get them," he added.

Some within the US intelligence community think that coronavirus emerged from "natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus. But they also find "low confidence" in the conclusion. Others have not been able to come to a firm opinion, said The Guardian report.

A part of the intelligence community has developed "moderate confidence" that patient zero may have come to existence due to a "laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology".

The report submitted to the Biden administration said that a more definitive explanation is not possible without new information from China, such as clinical samples and epidemiological data about the earliest cases.