Biden stunned security and health experts on Wednesday when he announced that at least one “element” of the intelligence community “leans more toward” a lab accident as the source of the outbreak, as opposed to a natural transference of the virus from an animal to a human. “Jaw-dropping,” one of the Trump-era officials involved in the hunt for covid-19’s origins said of Biden’s remarks and the president’s order that the intelligence agencies “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about the pandemic’s origins. They are to report back in 90 days... But in the fall of 2020, momentum picked up again. The U.S. intelligence community had obtained information that three workers at the Wuhan lab had fallen ill in November 2019 with symptoms similar to covid, which had sent them to the hospital. Their symptoms were also similar to seasonal illnesses, including the flu, but they’d gotten sick the month before the initial cases of the disease were confirmed in Wuhan. The officials had also come upon information that the Chinese military had been conducting experiments at the lab for years. That also renewed focus on the lab-leak theory.