President Joe Biden said Wednesday he is directing the intelligence community to dig deeper into the origins of the global pandemic, and whether or not a lab leak in Wuhan or host animal were the cause for the spread of the novel coronavirus, known as SARS-Cov-2.
However, Biden said he received an intelligence report earlier this month that did not conclude either scenario as more likely.
"Here is their current position: 'While two elements in the IC [Intelligence Community] 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,'" Biden said in a statement.
The theory of a Wuhan lab leak has gained fresh momentum in recent weeks, after Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Poynter Institute earlier this month he is not confident about the theory of origin in animals.
"Certainly the people who've investigated say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else. And we need to find that out," said Fauci, the nation's top epidemiologist and White House chief medical adviser.
