The document, which includes a section titled “The Case for the Laboratory-Associated Incident Hypothesis,” offers insight into the one intelligence agency that assessed with “moderate confidence” that the virus most likely emerged from a Chinese government lab in Wuhan.
The Friday release of the 17-page report follows the release of a two-page summary in August that also stated four other U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely has a natural origin.
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The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s 18 intelligence elements, said the classified version of the Friday report was previously presented to President Joe Biden and “policymakers” this summer.
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Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged the Biden administration to release the classified report quickly months ago and argued the Senate should pass his COVID Act of 2021 that “would authorize sanctions and other restrictions if the CCP fails to allow for a credible and comprehensive investigation into the origins of COVID-19 at laboratories in Wuhan.”
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In August, GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher said the unclassified summary managed to raise more questions than it answered.
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“The unclassified summary of the Intelligence Community probe into the origins of COVID-19 could have been shortened to three simple words: we don’t know. This cannot be the end of the investigation," he said.
“One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that COVID-19 most likely resulted from a laboratory associated incident involving WIV or other researchers — either through exposure to the virus during experiments or through sampling,” the ODNI wrote on Friday.
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The ODNI went on: “ analysts place emphasis on academic articles authored by WIV employees indicating that WIV scientists conducted research on other coronaviruses under what these analysts consider to be inadequate biosafety conditions that could have led to opportunities for a laboratory-associated incident. These analysts also take into account SARS-CoV-2’s genetic epidemiology and that the initial recorded COVID-19 clusters occurred only in Wuhan — and that WIV researchers who conducted sampling activity throughout China provided a node for the virus to enter the city.”
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“The analysts that find the laboratory-associated origin theory most likely assess that WIV researchers’ inherently risky work with coronaviruses provided numerous opportunities for them to unwittingly become infected with SARS-CoV-2. ... These analysts note that it is plausible that researchers may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus without sequencing it during experiments or sampling activities, possibly resulting in asymptomatic or mild infection,” the ODNI stated. “Academic literature indicates that WIV researchers conducted research with bat coronaviruses or collected samples from species that are known to carry close relatives of SARS-CoV-2.”
A World Health Organization-China study from early 2021 contended that a jump from animals to humans was most likely, but it was dismissed due to a lack of access to key data and Chinese influence over the investigation.
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