WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he has ordered a closer intelligence review of what he said were two equally plausible scenarios of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Biden revealed that earlier this year he tasked the intelligence community with preparing “a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of Covid-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”
“As of today, the U.S. Intelligence Community has ‘coalesced around two likely scenarios’ but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question,” Biden said in a statement.
“Here is their current position: ’while two elements in the IC leans toward the [human contact] scenario and one leans more toward the [lab leak scenario] – 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.
Biden’s statement mirrors the unique way that the intelligence community presents its findings to sitting presidents. This includes explaining when different agencies within the community disagree, and using a scale, low-moderate-high, to quantify the level of confidence analysts have in the accuracy of their assessments.
Biden issued the new directives as the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, still officially unknown, come under increasing scrutiny.
The hypothesis that the virus may have escaped from a Chinese laboratory, while initially dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory, has in recent months gained more mainstream traction.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recently said in Senate testimony that a lab-leak origin “certainly” was “one possibility.”
The CDC’s website currently says that while the exact source of the outbreak is unknown, “we know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat.”
Covid-19 was discovered near the city of Wuhan in China’s Hubei province. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has studied coronaviruses in the past, is at the center of the turmoil about the origins of the deadly pandemic, which has killed almost 3.5 million people.
