US Intelligence community releases full declassified report that does not determine origin of Covid-19
The 17-page report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence offered no new conclusions — the intelligence community remains split about whether the virus originated naturally or escaped from a lab — but it did address specific open-source theories that proponents have argued proved one of the two theories. In every case, the intelligence community concluded either that the data was insufficient to reach a conclusion or that the theory was patently wrong.
Still, the full report released Friday does give new insight into how the intelligence community viewed different puzzle pieces of publicly known evidence. For example in one high-profile instance, the intelligence community assessed that the fact that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell sick in the fall of 2019 “is not diagnostic of the pandemic’s origins,” the report reads. “Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of COVID-19 infection.”
The report explicitly rejects some public theorizing that a particular genetic feature of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, known as a furin cleavage site, proves that the virus was created in a lab.
“The IC assesses that public claims that some distinguishing features in SARS-CoV-2 are the result of genetic engineering are not diagnostic of genetic engineering,” the report reads. “[The] furin cleavage site (FCS)—a region in the spike protein that enables infection and has been the topic of open-source debate—can also be consistent with a natural origin of the virus.”
