This is a shift in the agency's position about the origin of the virus, but it says this with 'low confidence.'
The U.S. intelligence community, which also consists of agencies such as the Department of Energy , State and Treasury departments, has previously reported that three researchers from the Wuhan Insitute of Virology became acutely sick in November 2019, prior to the term COVID-19 was coined and needed hospital care.Concerns about biosafety procedures at these institutes have been flagged before and are the basis of the "lab-leak" hypothesis.
Now, in light of new intelligence, the DOE has changed its stance on how the virus spread but cited it with "low confidence" in a classified report provided to the White House and key members of Congress, theAs many as eight agencies of U.S. intelligence are independently probing into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, and four agencies, along with the national intelligence panel, believe that natural transmission was the likely cause, while two more remain undecided.
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