US agencies examine reports of early COVID infections in Wuhan
Al JazeeraUnited States officials are calling for an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. A still-classified US intelligence report circulated during former President Donald Trump’s administration alleged that three Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers became so ill in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, sources familiar with US intelligence reporting and analysis told the Reuters news agency. In a report written jointly with Chinese scientists and issued in March, a World Health Organization team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.” The US intelligence community “hasn’t ruled out either theory”, one US source said. The US State Department published a “fact sheet” on COVID-19 and the Wuhan lab on January 15, 2020, five days before Trump left office, based in part on information in the classified report, sources said. In their own report on the origins of COVID-19 issued last week, Republican members of the US House of Representatives intelligence committee asserted that there was “significant circumstantial evidence” suggesting COVID-19 “may have been a leak” from the Wuhan lab.