The United States declares the need for assistance from China
Washington. October 29. INTERFAX - The US intelligence community has come to the conclusion that the COVID-19 coronavirus was not developed as a biological weapon, according to a report published on Friday.
"We believe that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon," says the report of the American National Intelligence Council.
"Most agencies also assess with low confidence that the virus may not have been genetically modified. However, two agencies believe that there was insufficient data to make such an assessment," it says.
According to the report, the US intelligence agencies did not come to a consensus on the origin of the virus and consider two hypotheses of the origin of COVID-19 likely: infection through an animal and "an incident related to the work of the laboratory (in Wuhan - IF)."
The intelligence community cannot provide more specific information about the origin of COVID-19 without additional information that would allow to determine a specific path of natural contact with an animal or prove that the laboratory in Wuhan was engaged in SARS-CoV-2 or a close precursor virus before the appearance of COVID-19, the report notes.
It also says that "China's assistance will be necessary to achieve a final assessment of the origin of the virus."
"However, Beijing continues to obstruct the investigation, refuses to disclose information and blames other countries, including the United States," it stresses.
Infection with the COVID-19 coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei province at the end of 2019, then it began to spread worldwide. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a coronavirus pandemic.
By early April 2020, WHO reported that the number of cases of COVID-19 infection worldwide exceeded the figure of 1 million. By mid-October 2021, almost 240 million cases of infection were registered worldwide.
Most scientists initially believed that COVID-19 was a virus of zoonotic origin. It is assumed that it could be transmitted to humans from bats. To determine the source of the coronavirus, WHO initiated a special investigation. To this end, in early February 2021, a group of WHO experts visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology and, following the results of the visit, concluded that the leakage of viruses from the laboratory of the institute is "extremely unlikely." Many Western countries did not agree with the results of this investigation.
