Monitoring Desk
WASHINGTON: Despite US President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressing confidence that the novel coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab, a joint intelligence assessment by Washington and its allies reportedly calls that explanation “highly unlikely.”
The information shared among intelligence agencies of the so-called Five Eyes nations — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — concludes that the virus originated naturally in a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan, CNN reported Tuesday.
The report cited three Western officials with knowledge of the intelligence, at least two of whom are from Five Eyes nations. They said all of those countries — including the US — were coalescing around the assessment.
“We think it’s highly unlikely it was an accident” that started in a lab, one of the sources was quoted as saying. “It is highly likely it was naturally occurring and that the human infection was from natural human and animal interaction.”
Pompeo, a former head of the CIA, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that there was “enormous evidence” that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory in Wuhan.
But while highly critical of China’s handling of the matter, Pompeo declined to say whether he thought the virus had been released intentionally.
Trump has been increasingly critical of China’s role in the pandemic, which has infected more than 3.5 million people and killed more than 250,000 around the world. He has insisted that China recklessly concealed important information about the outbreak and demanded that Beijing be held “accountable.”
News reports say Trump has tasked US spies with finding out more about the origins of the virus.
An Australian newspaper, The Saturday Telegraph, recently cited a 15-page dossier prepared by the Five Eyes intelligence agencies saying China had deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence about the outbreak in an “assault on international transparency” that cost tens of thousands of lives.
US intelligence agencies have yet to issue a detailed public assessment.
The US intelligence community said in a statement Thursday that the coronavirus was not man-made or genetically modified, and that it was still working to “determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
One of the officials cited by CNN said the level of confidence expressed by Trump and Pompeo was “way out in front of where the current Five Eyes assessment is.”
But the source said there still was a possibility the virus originated in a lab, although there was no information to build a legitimate theory yet. The source said it was possible US intelligence agencies were not sharing all their data, even though the overwhelming majority is usually shared.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert, told National Geographic in an interview published Monday that “everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that (this virus) evolved in nature and then jumped species.”
