“The intelligence community and the rest of the government is still looking at this,” John Kirby, a White House national security spokesperson, said at a press briefing.
“There’s not been a definitive conclusion, so it’s difficult for me to say, nor should I feel like I should have to defend press reporting about a possible preliminary indication here,” he continued. “What the president wants is facts. He wants the whole government designed to go get those facts. And that’s what we’re doing, and we’re just not there yet.”
Kirby was responding to reports that the Energy Department had concluded — based on new intelligence — that a lab leak in China was the most likely cause of the pandemic, a shift from the previous position that it was not clear how the COVID-19 virus began to spread.
But the Energy Department study reportedly offered the conclusion with “low confidence,” and it’s not clear what the intelligence was that changed its conclusion.
The U.S. intelligence community is split on the conclusion that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. Four other federal agencies believe that it likely jumped to humans from an animal host outside a lab. Those findings are also reportedly made with low confidence.
Because of the way the virus and its origins have been politicized, experts have said it is extremely difficult to sort through the available information and come to a definitive conclusion— especially without a full buy-in from China.
The World Health Organization has said the possibility the coronavirus could have escaped from a lab warrants “further investigations,” but its efforts have been stymied by China’s refusal to cooperate.
Still, Republicans were ready to take a victory lap.
“Senator Tom Cotton deserves an apology,” the Republican National Committee tweeted Monday.
In February 2020, despite pushback from U.S. officials, the Arkansas Republican raised the possibility that the virus had originated in a Chinese biochemical lab, though he later walked back the assertion that the virus was a weapon.
Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are leading calls for the White House to declassify all intelligence documents on COVID.
