No direct evidence of COVID starting in Wuhan lab - US intelligence report says.

According to a report that was declassified on Friday, U.S. intelligence agencies did not discover any concrete proof that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by an incident at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.

However, the four-page report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) stated that the U.S. intelligence community was still unable to completely rule out the possibility that the virus originated in a lab and had been unable to identify the pandemic's origins.
"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 ODNI report stated.

Although "extensive work" had been done on coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute (WIV), according to the report, the agencies had not discovered proof of a particular incident that could have started 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 involving WIV personnel occurred before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic," the report stated.

Since the first human cases were reported in Wuhan in late 2019, the origins of the coronavirus pandemic have been the subject of raging debate in the US.