MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 26th February, 2023) The US Energy Department, which runs a network of national bioresearch labs, has joined the FBI in claiming that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from a test tube in a Wuhan lab, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday, citing a classified document.
The secret document, less than five pages in length, was provided to the White House and select Congress members as an update to a 2021 intelligence report, which said the Energy Department was undecided about the virus's origin, the newspaper said.
The Energy Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation now both suggest that the outbreak resulted from a mishap in a lab in Wuhan, which the WSJ says is the center of China's coronavirus research.
Four other federal US agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, are said to believe that the new coronavirus stems from natural transmission, while the Central Intelligence Agency and another agency that officials declined to identify remain undecided.
The Energy Department made the judgment with "low confidence," the WSJ quoted people who read the report as saying. The conclusion is reportedly based on new intelligence, which US officials who talked to the daily refused to elaborate on. The update also reaffirmed the agency's belief that COVID-19 was not the result of a Chinese bio weapons program.
The 2021 US intelligence report concluded that the virus first circulated in Wuhan no later than November 2019. The scientific and political community in the United States has been arguing since then about whether it escaped from a lab or emerged naturally and jumped from an infected animal to a human.
China has repeatedly lashed back against suggestions that its biological research program could have been the origin of the outbreak, which has claimed millions of lives globally since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020.
