The services have until the end of August to come to a general conclusion, CNN notes.
After more than two months of investigating the causes of the coronavirus, American intelligence still cannot develop a unified position on this issue. This was reported by CNN, citing sources.
The intelligence services have already formed a preliminary version of the report, which is currently being checked. Still, officials have not been able to determine in their research whether the coronavirus was developed in the laboratory or formed naturally. One of the sources familiar with the investigation noted that there is “nothing out of the ordinary” in the current version of the report. According to the TV channel, the intelligence services have until the end of August to change this.
U.S. President Joe Biden said at the end of May that the U.S. intelligence community does not have enough information to say with certainty how the spread of the new coronavirus began: after human contact with an infected animal or because of a possible incident in the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The American leader instructed the special services to double their efforts again to study all the available data and prepare a new report for him in 90 days.
On August 2, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Republican Michael McCaul, published a report with arguments in favor of the theory of the laboratory origin of the coronavirus.
According to him, the virus spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology due to an unidentified incident that occurred earlier on September 12, 2019 (four months before the publication by the Chinese authorities of the first data on COVID-19 cases in Wuhan). The report says that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could be working on the genetic modification of viruses. The authors of the document note that in the summer of 2019, the institute posted an ad about the search for specialists to update air disinfection systems, hazardous waste treatment, and ventilation.
