(Reuters) -U.S. intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report declassified on Friday said.
The four-page report said the intelligence agencies still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, however, and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic.
"The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting," the report said.
The agencies said that while "extensive work" had been conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan institute (WIV), they had not found evidence of a specific incident that could have caused the outbreak.
"We continue to have no indication that the WIV's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic," the report said.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
