New assessment on the origins of Covid-19 adds to the confusion

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“We want to know what led to this, so we can hopefully try and prevent something similar from happening in the future.”

Those words, from Dr. David Relman, an infectious disease expert and microbiologist at Stanford University, reflected the national conversation around the origins of Covid-19 in 2021.

Did it come from a lab? Was it a zoonotic transfer? Something else? Surely, with time, an answer would become clear.

But now, three years removed from the start of a pandemic that is still disrupting daily life, an assessment from the US Energy Department is only adding to the confusion about what really happened in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.

The department has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.

Yet two sources said that the department assessed in the intelligence report that it had “low confidence” that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, CNN’s Jeremy Herb and Natasha Bertrand reported.

Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence; and a low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan acknowledged on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the intelligence community is divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.

The intelligence…