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 Biden in May ordered aides to work to resolve disputes among
intelligence agencies examining rival theories about how the novel
coronavirus started, including a once-dismissed theory about the
possibility of a laboratory accident in China, as well as that the
virus originated naturally with animals, such as bats or birds.
A 90-day intelligence review the president ordered is due on
Tuesday, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, with
the release of unclassified portions likely to take a few days
longer.
Yet three U.S. government officials and a fourth person familiar
with the scope of the investigation said they did not expect the
review to lead to firm conclusions after China stymied earlier
international efforts to gather key information on the ground.
Instead, one official said the report would likely point to
additional lines of inquiry that officials could pursue, including
demands of China that are likely to further ratchet up tensions with
Beijing at a time when the country's ties with Washington are at
their lowest point in decades.
"It's basically impossible to have a proper investigation if one of
the main parties doesn't want to cooperate," said Thomas Wright,
Brookings Institution senior fellow and co-author of "Aftershocks,"
a book about the pandemic with Biden's Under Secretary of Defense
Colin Kahl. "We need to proceed as if both hypotheses are true."
The report also comes as the U.S. intelligence agencies have come
under pressure from within the administration and Congress over
issues related to the handling of Afghanistan after the fall of
Kabul to the Taliban came faster than many U.S. intelligence,
defense and diplomatic analysts predicted.
COVID-19 has killed 4.6 million people worldwide, according to a
Reuters tally https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps,
but its precise origins remain shrouded in mystery.
The first known cases emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan
in December 2019 and U.S. agencies started looking into the origins
shortly afterwards.
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 U.S. spy agencies initially
strongly favored the explanation that the virus
originated in nature.
A team led by the World Health Organization
(WHO) that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan
in January and February said the virus had
probably been transmitted from bats to humans
through another animal.
But their March report https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus,
which was written jointly with Chinese
scientists and concluded that the lab theory was
"extremely unlikely," did not satisfy
Washington. People familiar with
intelligence reporting have said that there has been little
corroboration over recent months that the virus had spread widely
and naturally amongst wild animals.
Meanwhile, China has refused to give U.S. researchers the kind of
access to the Wuhan lab and officials there that the U.S. believes
it would need to definitively try to determine the virus' origins.
The WHO's director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said the
group has not ruled out any hypothesis. The Geneva-based
organization is set to impanel a new group to further examine the
origins of the virus causing COVID-19.
For its part, China has ridiculed a theory that COVID-19 escaped
from the state virology lab in Wuhan and pushed fringe theories
including that the virus slipped out of a lab in Fort Detrick,
Maryland, in 2019.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Mark Hosenball; additional
reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; editing by Richard Pullin)
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