After 3 months of investigations, the intelligence community still can’t determine the origin of COVID-19

• In May, Biden ordered intelligence agencies to deliver a report on the origin of COVID-19 in 90 days.
• The report, issued on Tuesday, did not find a conclusive origin, The Washington Post reported.
• Experts told the Post that it could take years to learn how the virus originated.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

After three months of investigating, the intelligence community is still unable to determine whether or not the coronavirus emerged from a Wuhan lab, The Washington Post reported.

In May, President Joe Biden set a 90-day timeline for the intelligence community to deliver a report on the origins of the coronavirus. A report sent to him on Tuesday was inconclusive on whether or not the virus originated due to animal to human transmission or escaped from a lab.

In February, a WHO investigation in Wuhan, China, found that the virus most likely jumped from animals to people. However, the possibility that it could have come from a lab was not ruled out.

The assessment sent to Biden on Tuesday had no definitive conclusion. Two senior officials told The Wall Street Journal it’s partly because of limited information shared by China.

“It was a deep dive, but you can only go so deep as the situation allows,” one official told the Journal. “If China’s not going to give access to certain data sets, you’re never really going to know.”

Former President Donald Trump and numerous high-level officials in his administration perpetuated the theory that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but more officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, began to speculate on the possibility and call for answers after a report showed that three researchers at the lab became sick with flu-like symptoms in November 2019 and went to the hospital.

Experts told the Post that three months isn’t enough to figure out the origin and that it could take years to uncover.

“We should not even be thinking about closing the book or backing off, but rather ratcheting up the effort,” David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist, told the Post.