No evidence Covid created in China’s Wuhan lab: US intelligence
- Declassified report comes three months after US lawmakers demanded a fuller explanation of intelligence information on the pandemic’s origins
- Coronaviruses used in Wuhan lab for research and vaccine development ‘too distantly related to have led to the creation of Sars-CoV-2’, report says
In a declassified report on Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with Covid-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community, the report said some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to Covid-19.
But the United States “has no information” indicating they had done such work on the specific Covid-19 virus, known as Sars-CoV-2, or on any “close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely related enough to have been the source of the pandemic”, it said.
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The report, made for Congress and carrying an unreleased classified annex, came three months after lawmakers demanded a fuller explanation of US intelligence information on the origins of the pandemic which erupted at the end of 2019.