Did COVID-19 come from a Chinese lab? Why a new U.S. report is renewing questions

A new U.S. Department of Energy report has further underscored the continued divide in the U.S. intelligence community and elsewhere over the pandemic's origins.

A new intelligence report from the U.S. Department of Energy that reportedly concludes it’s possible the COVID-19 pandemic originated from an accidental laboratory leak in China is renewing questions over where the virus came from.

But the report, which has not been made public but is the subject of reporting by multiple American media outlets, has also further underscored the continued divide in the U.S. intelligence community and elsewhere over the pandemic’s origins — a point echoed by the White House on Monday.

“There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how COVID started,” said John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council. “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.”

The report’s findings differ from other intelligence agencies’ conclusions — which are also not definitive — that the virus jumped from an animal to a human in nature, as past coronaviruses have. Those findings were also raised by China’s foreign ministry in response to the Energy Department report.

“Certain parties should stop rehashing the ‘lab leak’ narrative, stop smearing China and stop politicizing origins-tracing,” spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters Monday, according to a translated transcript.

Here’s what the media reporting about the new report says, why the Department of Energy is investigating COVID-19’s origins at all, and what may happen next.

As the Wall Street Journal first reported over the weekend — and later confirmed by CNN, the New York Times and other outlets — the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence concluded with “low confidence” that the virus likely emerged from a Chinese laboratory.

That conclusion is consistent with a persistent theory that the virus that was first detected in Wuhan, China, leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a top coronavirus research facility.