Intel Committee Chair: Declassified Wuhan Lab Report Falls Short.

The Battle for Answers on COVID-19 Origins

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee declared Sunday that the declassified report on the origins of COVID-19 isn’t sufficient, leaving many unsatisfied with the limited new details revealed.

In a Sunday interview, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio) demanded more information after a 10-page report was released by the U.S. intelligence community on Friday.

“We passed a law saying declassify the information you have about the COVID [pandemic] and Wuhan lab’s activities. What they did is basically went and did a paper on what they believe about the intelligence they’ve looked at. To give you an example, we’ve asked to open the curtain and release the intelligence, and they went behind the curtain, read the stuff, and came out and said this is what we think about it,” Turner told CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

But the report “is not sufficient,” Turner added, “and this is going to set up a battle between the Congress and the director of national intelligence to make certain that law passed unanimously—both the Senate and House and signed by the president—is complied with, but also the American public get the answers they deserve.”

Uncertainty Remains

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence report found that there isn’t clear evidence that COVID-19, which was first detected in China’s Wuhan city in 2019, started at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. However, it stated that the U.S. intelligence community still couldn’t rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic.

“The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,” the ODNI report stated, noting that “extensive work” was done on coronaviruses at the lab.

Debate and Funding

The origins of COVID-19, a type of coronavirus, have been a matter of debate in the United States. Critics of the federal government’s response say that the National Institutes of Health provided funding to a third-party group to perform research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan research facility, while the first reported cases worldwide were in Wuhan.

The U.S. intelligence report, meanwhile, has left many questions unanswered.