Four intelligence agencies, and the National Intelligence Council, consider the natural causes theory more plausible. One agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, backs the lab leak theory. But none of those agencies have delivered to the director of national intelligence or the White House a high-confidence assessment, which shows the doubt that continues to swirl around the question.

The intelligence community has broadly concluded that the virus causing Covid-19 was not deliberately engineered in a lab. But even that conclusion is made only with low confidence. Some genetic engineering techniques make modifications difficult to identify, particularly given existing gaps in knowledge about the diversity of naturally occurring coronaviruses…

There is broad agreement in the Biden administration that China has not shared all it can about the origins of the outbreak. The intelligence report released on Friday called for more transparency by China, and said Beijing needed to release information about possible intermediate species that the virus could have infected before leaping to humans, what it knows about the nature of the first human infections and more data about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s research work.