There was no evidence that the Covid-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab, the head of US intelligence said.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with Covid-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report said some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to Covid-19.
But the US "has no information" indicating they had done such work on the specific Covid-19 virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, or on any "close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely related-enough to have been the source of the pandemic".