President Joe Biden had commissioned the report from his secret services three months ago. The document was secretly submitted to the White House this week.
The US secret services have published their eagerly awaited report on the origin of the coronavirus – and have not been able to present a clear result. In the report made public on Friday, both an animal-to-human transmission and a laboratory accident in China are described as “plausible hypotheses”. Clinical samples or data on early infection cases in China were missing for a final assessment, the secret services said.
Report: US secret services cannot clarify the origin of the corona
The intelligence services are “still split” on the question of what the “most likely origin” of the corona pandemic is, the report said. Four US secret services come to the conclusion with “low” certainty that the pandemic can be traced back to a virus transmission from animal to human.
Two other secret services, however, assume with “medium” certainty that a laboratory accident led to the pandemic. Analysts in three other services could not agree on an assignment. The reason for the differences is the different weighting of the “intelligence reports and scientific publications as well as the intelligence and scientific gaps”, it said.
In the report of the National Secret Service Directorate requested by US President Joe Biden, however, it is excluded that the coronavirus was developed as a “biological weapon”. Most secret services also do not assume that the virus was caused by genetic manipulation – even if two services did not want to endorse this judgment because the situation is not sufficiently clear.
China had “no prior knowledge”
Finally, the report highlights “that China’s officials had no prior knowledge of the virus prior to the original Covid-19 outbreak.”
Biden had commissioned the report from his secret services three months ago. The document was secretly submitted to the White House this week. An edited summary intended for the public has now been released.
After the release, Biden accused China of still withholding important information about the origin of the pandemic. Chinese officials prevented international investigators and the international health community from accessing such information from the start. “To this day, the People’s Republic of China has been rejecting requests for transparency and withholding information,” said the president.
“Our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest,” promised Biden. “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world.” This is necessary to prevent a new pandemic.
Meanwhile around 4.5 million victims
The corona pandemic, which has now fallen victim to around 4.5 million people worldwide, began in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019. It was soon speculated that the virus could have escaped in an accident from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, which is researching coronaviruses. The Chinese government vigorously denies this.
The Chinese embassy in Washington again denied the allegations that Beijing was keeping information about the corona virus under lock and key. The US intelligence report once again shows Washington’s determination to continue “the wrong path of political manipulation,” she said. The aim of the report is to label the People’s Republic as a “scapegoat”.
It was only in January of this year that a team of international experts on behalf of the World Health Organization (WHO) was able to visit Wuhan – more than a year after the virus was discovered. Their report was published in late March but did not provide any clear results. The WHO experts classified the so-called laboratory theory as “extremely unlikely”.
However, doubts quickly arose about the investigation and the report. Many countries expressed concern that international experts had been denied access to critical data during their investigation in China. The Chinese government vehemently rejects further investigations, as requested by WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, was a great advocate of laboratory theory. According to critics, he was mainly trying to distract from his own failure in the pandemic.
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