The American intelligence services still do not rule out the hypothesis of the laboratory accident to explain the appearance in Wuhan, China, of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials said on Wednesday.
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“The intelligence community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was initially transmitted,” intelligence director Avril Haines told a Senate committee.
She mentioned the “two theories” explaining the origin of the coronavirus: human contact with infected animals or the laboratory accident.
“We are there,” she added. “But we are continuing to work on this issue, we are gathering information and we are doing everything possible to give you as much confidence as possible” in the explanations on the origin of the pandemic.
“We are doing everything we can and we are using all the resources at our disposal to shed light on this,” added CIA Director William Burns.
But “what is clear for us and our experts is that the Chinese leaders have not been completely frank or transparent in their cooperation” with the World Health Organization (WHO) on the origin of the coronavirus, he added.
Intelligence services are cooperating with other government agencies and universities to try to determine the exact provenance of the virus, said General Paul Nakasone, head of the military intelligence agency, the NSA.
In their report published at the end of March, the international experts of the WHO had judged “extremely unlikely” the theory according to which the coronavirus could have escaped from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, the city of central China where the COVID -19 appeared at the end of 2019.
But WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked a few days later to continue investigating this hypothesis, noting that international experts “had told him about their difficulties in accessing raw data” during their stay in China.
The thesis of the leak of the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been strongly defended by the US administration under President Donald Trump, based on information from the intelligence services. China has always denied this possibility.