According to several officials and lawmakers I talked to, the review was doomed to fail from the start. There was a limited scope and a tight deadline. According to reports, the intelligence community hadn’t even started analyzing huge amounts of its own data on the Wuhan labs when the review began. Then, when they finally began poring over what they had collected, they realized they didn’t have enough analysts trained to understand the highly technical, mostly Chinese-language information.

“Ninety days was not enough time to break new ground,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me. “The intelligence community must keep pursuing new avenues of inquiry until sufficient evidence is gathered to draw a satisfying conclusion. … The American people deserve the truth about how this virus emerged, which this assessment did not provide.”

A senior administration official told me that the intelligence community’s work continues and that “U.S. government technical experts” have asked their Chinese counterparts for several categories of information, including data, virus samples and genetic sequence information from the earliest cases; samples taken from food markets in Wuhan; and information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and illnesses of researchers there in late 2019. The summary itself says the intelligence community will be “unable to provide a more definitive explanation” unless more information comes to light, essentially conceding defeat.