Covid-19 origin mystery: ‘No direct evidence that it started in…’, says US intelligence report

“There is no direct evidence found that the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology,” a four-page report by US intelligence agencies said on Friday. 

It said the intelligence agencies could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory. However, the agencies have not been to discover the Covid-19 pandemic origin, according to a report published by Reuters. 

"The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting," the report said.

The agencies said that while "extensive work" had been conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute (WIV), they had not found evidence of a specific incident that could have caused the outbreak.

"We continue to have no indication that the WIV's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic," the report added.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 before fanning out around the world and killing nearly 7 million people.

Earlier in April, another report suggested that illegally traded wild animals in the Chinese city had triggered the coronavirus pandemic. But researchers have published the first-ever peer-reviewed analysis of biological evidence taken from the Wuhan wet market.

“The analysis confirms that swabs from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market — which closed in January 2020 and has long been linked to the start of the pandemic — contained genetic material from wild animals and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2," the paper said.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organization reiterated calls for China to share information, insisting that all hypotheses would continue to remain on the table until this happened.

Data from the early days of the COVID pandemic was briefly uploaded by Chinese scientists to an international database last month. It included genetic sequences found in more than 1,000 environmental and animal samples taken in January 2020 at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.

(With Reuters inputs)