The corona pandemic seems to be over, but the question of its origin remains unresolved. According to a media report, a US ministry is now changing its assessment: it is now assumed that there was a laboratory accident in China. The reason for the change of heart should be new findings.
According to a media report, the US Department of Energy has changed its assessment of the origin of the corona virus and is now assuming a possible laboratory breakdown. This emerges from a classified intelligence report that was recently submitted to the White House and key members of Congress, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources.
The Department of Energy thus agrees with the FBI's assessment that the virus probably spread through a glitch in a Chinese laboratory. However, the ministry assumes this with only a “low” degree of certainty.
US President Joe Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Sunday that he could neither confirm nor deny the report. "At the moment there is no definitive answer from the secret services to this question," Sullivan emphasized, referring to the origin of the virus. "Some parts of the intelligence community have come to conclusions on the one hand, others have said they simply don't have enough information to be sure."
Some US authorities remain of the view that the virus was likely transmitted naturally, others are undecided. The Department of Energy's conclusion is based on new evidence, according to the report. However, it remained unclear what these findings were. The ministry was previously undecided in its assessment, according to the Wall Street Journal. Like other US departments, the ministry has its own Intelligence and Counterintelligence Office, which is part of the US intelligence community. These trace the origin of the coronavirus.
In 2021, after several months of scrutiny, there was no agreement among US intelligence agencies on the origin of the coronavirus. Whether the virus came from a laboratory or jumped from an animal to humans is unclear, according to a report published at the time, in which the intelligence departments of various agencies published their assessments. China has always denied allegations of a possible laboratory accident.
