The Federal Bureau of Investigations has concluded that it has "moderate confidence" in the origin of the coronavirus being an accidental leak from a Chinese laboratory, making it the only agency with such a belief following a 90-day investigation into the virus' origins, according to an intelligence report.
"One [intelligence community] element assesses with moderate confidence that COVID-19 most likely resulted from a laboratory-associated incident involving WIV or other researchers—either through exposure to the virus during experiments or through sampling," the report noted.
The 17-page report, declassified Friday, notes that only one agency endorsed the lab-leak theory following the review but does not identify which agency came to this conclusion. However, The New York Times found the FBI to be the sole agency to back the lab-leak theory. Wuhan, China, the city where the COVID-19 pandemic started, has a number of virology laboratories, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where bat coronaviruses were studied.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's report comes after President Joe Biden ordered a 90-day review earlier this year to determine how COVID-19 originated. A summary was released in August, which stated that agencies were unable to produce conclusive evidence about whether the coronavirus stemmed from an animal or a laboratory.
Friday's report noted that four agencies within the intelligence community, along with the National Intelligence Council, concluded, with "low confidence," that the pandemic began with the coronavirus jumping from an animal to a human while several other agencies failed to reach a conclusion.
"Although the [intelligence community] has no indications that WIV research involved Sars-Cov-2 [the virus that causes Covid-19] or a close progenitor virus, these analysts note that it is plausible that researchers may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus without sequencing it during experiments or sampling activities, possibly resulting in asymptomatic or mild infection," the report reads.
The report also determined that, if the virus did leak from a laboratory, Chinese officials "probably were unaware in the initial months that such an incident had occurred."
"Early in the pandemic, the WIV identified that a new virus was responsible for the outbreak in Wuhan," the report stated. "It is therefore assessed that WIV researchers pivoted to COVID-19-related work to address the outbreak and characterize the virus. These activities suggest that WIV personnel were unaware of the existence of SARS-CoV-2 until the outbreak was underway."
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