US will have ‘definitive’ report on Covid-19 origins, Trump says, after pushing ‘Wuhan lab’ theory

The US will report “very definitively” on the origins of the Covid-19 virus over time, President Donald Trump has said without any further details. Washington has been claiming it came from a Chinese lab, but provided no evidence.

"We will be reporting very definitively over a period of time," Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday.

Trump said last week that he had a “high degree of confidence” that the novel coronavirus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, but he has not offered any evidence publicly to back up the claim.

In a statement last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said the US intelligence community was in agreement with the wider scientific consensus that the virus was "not man-made or genetically modified." It added, however, that it would investigate whether the infection spread from contact with animals or if it was "the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan."

Reports last week suggested Trump was at odds with the spy agencies and that administration officials were pushing them to legitimize the theory that Covid-19 came from a Chinese lab.

Intelligence sources who spoke to the Guardian this week also said there was no evidence to back up Trump's Wuhan lab theory after a 15-page leaked dossier blamed Beijing for starting the pandemic. The sources told the newspaper that the document was not based on intelligence from the Five Eyes network of spy agencies from the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

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