Our intelligence community doesn’t like to say “we don’t know.” It likes to “estimate” probabilities. Unless they surprise themselves with a smoking gun that can’t be interpreted away, watch their body language. Do they emphasize the evidence or the uncertainty?

Here’s betting it will be the latter. Nothing gleaned by the intelligence snoops can put Covid back in its bottle. It’s hard to see any political upside for Democrats. Unless the Biden administration’s popularity is in free fall in three weeks and needs a foreign conflict to revive it, every incentive points toward changing the subject…

In the unlikely event the U.S. wanted to take the question further, how might it proceed? Recruit the right people, issue unambiguous marching orders and provide them a very large budget. One plausible avenue would be to scour the world for early Covid samples and the travel histories of their carriers. Thousands likely traveled through Wuhan during the period when Beijing seems to have suppressed news of the outbreak. If some sought care, if tissue samples are recoverable, a genetic family tree might shed light on the virus’s emergence. The scale of such a project would be daunting: finding the evidence, sequencing the fragments, analyzing their relationship. Going down this road does not lend itself to flexibility. If you invest humongously in finding the truth, you are then obliged to do something about it.