Politics : Biden's top intelligence official says COVID origins may never be known

Last month, President Biden directed the intelligence community to conduct a 90-day review of what he described as the two plausible theories for how the pandemic originated. In one scenario, the virus emerged from human contact with an animal. In the other, it leaked out of a lab in Wuhan, China.

But Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, expressed considerable caution about the likelihood of the U.S. government solving this vexing mystery.

From listening intently to both sides of the debate, Haines does understand why both arguments seem so plausible. “It’s true that the vast majority of pandemics and novel diseases have originated through human contact with animals, but you also look at the fact that it appears to have come from the area in which this lab was doing work on coronaviruses and you have to look at that option as well. You can make an argument in either direction.”

Haines even posited a third, hybrid theory for the virus’s origin. “It could be, for example, a scenario in which a scientist comes into contact with an animal that they’re sampling from” and contracts the virus in that way.

Should the review end with no definitive resolution on the origins of the virus, Haines will have no choice but to give Biden and other senior policymakers that unsatisfying answer.

Added Haines, “We’re going to do our damnedest to try to get an answer. But what policymakers hope and expect from me, I think, is that I present to them what we do and what we don’t know, and I don’t try to make something up or give them an answer that I think they might like to have.”