No direct evidence that Covid started in China's Wuhan lab, says US intelligence report

A report by the United States intelligence agencies has found no direct evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology.

However, the four-page report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, and said that they had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic.

The ODNI report said: "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 report said that while "extensive work" had been conducted on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute (WIV), the agencies had not found evidence of a specific incident that could have caused the origin of the pandemic.

"We continue to have no indication that the WIV's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic," the report said.

Debate over origin of Covid-19

The origins of the coronavirus pandemic have been a matter of furious debate in the United States as well as other countries, almost since the first human cases were reported in Wuhan in late 2019.

In March, US President Joe Biden signed a bill declassifying information related to the origins of the pandemic.

Biden said at the time of signing that he shared Congress' goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin of Covid-19.

A report by the Wall Street Journal in February said that the US Energy Department had assessed with "low confidence" in a classified intelligence report that the pandemic most likely arose from a Chinese laboratory leak. The report by the Journal refueled the debate. However, Beijing denied the report.

FBI director Christopher Wray said on February 28 that his agency had assessed for some time that the origins of the pandemic were "most likely a potential lab incident" in the Chinese city of Wuhan. China said this claim had "no credibility whatsoever".

As of March 20, four other US agencies still judged that Covid-19 was likely the result of natural transmission, while two were undecided.

Active Covid cases in India:

Meanwhile, India's Covid-19 infection tally rose by 55 in a day while active cases declined to 1,653 from 1,712 a day earlier, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Saturday.

The death toll was recorded at 5,31,903 with one fatality reported in Maharashtra, the data updated at 8 am stated.

The tally of Covid cases was recorded at 4.49 crore. The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 4,44,60,316, while the case fatality rate was recorded at 1.18 per cent.

According to the ministry's website, 220.66 crore doses of Covid vaccine have been administered in the country so far under the nationwide COVID-19 vaccination drive.

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