A declassified report claims that US intelligence agencies have not discovered any concrete proof that Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), both a natural and laboratory origin remain conceivable theories.
It was noted that the majority of US intelligence services concur that the virus was not genetically modified or "laboratory-adapted".
In the US, there has been strident disagreement over the pandemic's causes.
China has categorically rejected the lab-leak hypothesis.
The US intelligence was given 90 days to declassify what it knew about the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) after a bill was passed by Congress in March, and the ODNI report was made public on Friday night.
In the 10-page report, it was stated that "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 difficulties with conflicting reporting.".
According to the findings, four agencies think that humans caught the virus from animals.
The FBI and the Energy Department are still of the opinion that the virus escaped from a lab.
According to the conclusions, the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus originated in a lab.
According to the report, all US intelligence agencies concur that Covid-19 was not created as a biological weapon.
Despite not working on any infections that could have reasonably given rise to Covid-19, it claimed that the WIV and Chinese army had collaborated on coronavirus research for public health needs.
The report also mentioned, however, that WIV researchers have created "chimeras," or combinations of coronaviruses, and used reverse genetic cloning procedures that could conceal deliberate changes.
According to the findings, some researchers did not likely take enough biosafety precautions prior to the pandemic.
The report claims that US intelligence is not aware of a specific Wuhan lab biosafety incident that resulted in an outbreak of Covid-19.
The illness of several researchers there in the fall of 2019 could have been brought on by a variety of illnesses, and some of their symptoms did not match those of Covid-19, it said.
President Joe Biden's administration was accused of "continued obfuscation" in response to the report by John Ratcliffe, who previously served as the US Director of National Intelligence under former President Donald Trump.
According to Mr. Ratcliffe, "The lab-leak is the only theory backed by science, intelligence, and common sense.".
The Huanan wet market, where the first cluster of Covid infections first appeared in late 2019, is only 40 minutes from the WIV, according to those who support the leak theory.
The lab-leak theory was deemed "extremely unlikely" by a joint investigation by China and the World Health Organization in 2021, but the organization faced criticism for that finding because many experts thought it raised more questions than it resolved.
According to some experts, the true causes of Covid, which has killed close to seven million people worldwide, may never be discovered.
