According to US media reports, a classified US intelligence report was not conclusive about the origins and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was partly due to a lack information from China.
Two US officials who were familiar with the matter said that the Tuesday assessment, ordered by President Joe Biden, could not definitively determine whether the virus that appeared in central China in the first place, had escaped from a secure Wuhan research facility or jumped to humans.
They indicated that parts of the report might be classified in the next few days.
The controversy over the source of the virus, which has paralysed more than 4,000,000 people worldwide, has been growing in intensity.
Biden stated that the US intelligence agencies were divided over the possible scenarios of animals and lab when he assigned the investigation.
Trump's former president and his aides contributed to the lab-leak theory amid fierce criticism of their handling of the largest outbreak in history. They pointed the finger at Beijing which strongly rejects the idea.
The 90-day review, despite Biden's request that the intelligence community intensify their efforts to resolve the origin debate, did not bring them closer to consensus, officials told the Post.
According to Wall Street Journal, part of the problem is the lack of specific information from China. An official from China told the Wall Street Journal that China is unlikely to provide access to certain data sets, and that this would make it impossible to really know the truth. The report is confidential.
Beijing rejected US and other country's requests for a renewed origin investigation following a highly politicised visit of a World Health Organization team. In January, the results were inconclusive. The WHO team was criticised for not allowing transparency and access.
There is greater pressure to examine the theory of lab-leaks more carefully.
The natural origin hypothesis that the virus originated in bats and then spread to humans was widely accepted at the beginning of the pandemic. Scientists have yet to find a virus in bats or any other animal that matches Sars-CoV-2's genetic signature.
Experts are now more open to the possibility that the virus may have leaked from a Wuhan lab performing bat coronavirus research, a theory once dismissed by the US far right.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is the WHO director general. He has accepted that the WHO's initial investigation into Wuhans virus labs was not sufficient.
Beijing was furious at the WHO's request for the second stage of investigations to include lab audits. Zeng Yixin (Vice-Minister of Health) said that the plan was disrespectful to common sense and arrogant towards science.
