A new assessment by U.S. spy agencies of the origins of Covid-19 that was delivered to the White House Tuesday didn’t yield a definitive conclusion on whether the new coronavirus jumped to humans naturally, or via a lab leak, in part because of the lack of detailed information from China, two senior U.S. officials said.
The new assessment, which was ordered by President Biden 90 days ago, highlights the administration’s difficult challenge to wrest more information from Beijing that would shed light on how the global pandemic began.
It underscores the importance of inducing China to share lab records, genomic samples, and other data that could provide further illumination on the origins of the virus, which has killed more than four million people world-wide, current and former officials said.
“It was a deep dive, but you can only go so deep as the situation allows,” one U.S. official said. “If China’s not going to give access to certain data sets, you’re never really going to know.”