President Joe Biden has asked the U.S. intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” to get to the bottom of how COVID-19 started spreading in human populations to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.”
The new report, which is expected to build on existing intelligence, is due within 90 days.
Biden said that investigators may have additional questions for China as they work to determine whether it is more likely that the coronavirus emerged by accident from a lab that studies coronaviruses or whether it jumped from animals to humans in a more natural environment, as many experts have theorized.
“Shortly after I became President, in March, I had my National Security Advisor task the Intelligence Community to prepare a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of COVID-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” Biden said in a statement Wednesday. He received the first report earlier this month.
“As of today,” Biden said, “the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question. Here is their current position: ‘while two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter ― each with low or moderate confidence ― the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.’”