On Monday, the White House announced there is no consensus in the Biden administration about whether COVID-19 sprang from a leak in a virus laboratory in China or was the result of a leap from another species to humans.
The announcement was prompted by a Wall Street Journal report that the Department of Energy, one of several federal entities in the intelligence community that has weighed in on the origins of the virus, had "low confidence" that the pandemic started when a novel coronavirus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Some trumpeted this as proof the virus was a Chinese leak. But other parts of the intelligence community disagree.
There are, however, areas of consensus among the agencies investigating COVID's origins, according to a declassified 2021 assessment by the director of national intelligence:
