WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- President Joe Biden was set to be briefed on the U.S. intelligence community’s investigation into how COVID-19 started, with the report likely to disappoint in delivering clear answers about the deadly pandemic’s origin in China.
Biden in May ordered aides to work to resolve disputes among intelligence agencies examining rival theories about how the novel coronavirus started, including a once-dismissed theory about the possibility of a laboratory accident in China, as well as that the virus originated naturally with animals, such as bats or birds.
A 90-day intelligence review the president ordered was due on Tuesday, according to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, with the release of unclassified portions likely to take a few days longer.
Yet three U.S. government officials and a fourth person familiar with the scope of the investigation said they did not expect the review to lead to firm conclusions.
Instead, one official said the report would likely point to additional lines of inquiry that officials could pursue, including demands of China that are likely to further ratchet up tensions with Beijing at a time when the country’s ties with Washington are at their lowest point in decades.
The report also comes as the U.S. intelligence agencies have come under pressure from within the administration and Congress over issues related to the handling of Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban came faster than many U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic analysts predicted.
COVID-19 has killed 4.6 million people worldwide, according to a Reuters tally, but its precise origins remain shrouded in mystery.
The first known cases emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 and U.S. agencies started looking into the origins shortly afterwards.
U.S. spy agencies initially strongly favored the explanation that the virus originated in nature.
A team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal.
But their March report, which was written jointly with Chinese scientists and concluded that the lab theory was “extremely unlikely,” did not satisfy Washington.
For its part, China has ridiculed a theory that COVID-19 escaped from the state virology lab in Wuhan and pushed other theories including that the virus slipped out of a lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 2019.