白宫官员告诉美国广播公司新闻，乔·拜登总统已经听取了他的情报部门调查新冠肺炎起源的机密报告。
官员们表示，随着评估报告送达拜登的办公桌，情报机构正协同工作，准备一份非机密摘要，供公众使用。
评估的提交符合拜登对病毒起源进行90天深入挖掘的最后期限，这是在此前的努力未能得出明确结论后，总统于5月指示情报机构“加倍努力”时启动的。
但在最后期限到来之际，负责研究病毒起源的国际科学家周三警告称，另一个关键窗口正在“迅速关闭”:完成任何彻底科学研究的机会正在减少。世界卫生组织领导的一份报告的十多位作者说，随着时间的推移，潜在的证据越来越少，追溯生物面包屑将产生递减的回报，该报告敦促世卫组织采取行动“快速跟踪所需的后续科学工作”，以获得更好的答案。
评估今年春天获得的情报和原始数据，对拜登和他的高级官员来说很明显大量的信息官员们告诉美国广播公司新闻，尚未进行全面分析，包括可能掌握该病毒线索的潜在证据，该病毒目前已在全球夺走400多万人的生命。
拜登政府高级官员的共识是，大流行起源于两种方式之一:病毒来自人类与受感染动物的接触，或者来自实验室事故。
但是没有”犯罪的确凿证据“由于对原始数据的获取有限，对科学的讨论在一片间接证据的阴霾中进行。
继拜登之后呼吁澄清今年5月，情报机构花了过去三个月的时间仔细研究一个尚未开发的信息宝库，收集了机密记录和通信、病毒的基因组指纹，以及病毒可能在何时何地首先爆发的早期信号。
拜登8月的最后期限标志着一个更大的国际任务的下一阶段的零点:追溯病毒，以便追究责任方的责任，并理解其开始，以防止下一个。
然而，任何新的答案都是在一场激烈的地缘政治辩论中出现的，因为新冠肺炎的起源在国内已经成为一个有争议的楔形问题，而在国外，中国政府强烈否认病毒可能来自其实验室之一。
“美国关心的不是事实和真相，而是如何消费和诽谤中国，”中国外交部发言人赵周三在美国报告发布前表示，他声称中国欢迎合作研究，这“为下一阶段的全球起源追踪工作奠定了基础。”
中国政府拒绝了世界卫生组织7月份提出的对武汉实验室的审计，这是联合国机构建议的第二阶段研究的一部分，称在已经得出“明确结论”的情况下，他们不能接受不必要的“重复研究”。
但是对于新冠肺炎来自哪里，还没有明确的结论。世卫组织领导的联合小组在3月份的报告中提出了一系列选择，称实验室泄漏“极不可能”，但提供了进一步调查的途径。团队成员表达了对中国政府缺乏合作的不满，并在国际批评政治阻碍了科学。
从那以后，世卫组织越来越容易接受病毒是由实验室泄漏引起的可能性。今年7月，世卫组织总干事特德罗斯·阿德汗默·格布雷耶斯承认，排除实验室泄漏理论为时过早，并建议在进一步研究中对武汉实验室进行审计。中国随后的拒绝让世卫组织在没有他们的情况下继续工作。
白宫国家安全顾问杰克·沙利文强调，美国将继续“外交准备工作”，争取对世卫组织领导的研究的支持，同时警告说，美国政府不会接受北京的阻挠。
沙利文在6月份对福克斯新闻频道说:“他们要么以负责任的方式允许调查人员真正搞清楚(新冠肺炎)来自哪里，要么在国际社会中面临孤立。”。
一群两党议员敦促拜登不要让本月的最后期限阻碍彻底的调查。
参议院情报委员会的参议员马克·华纳(D-Virginia)和马尔科·卢比奥(R-Fla)以及参议院外交关系委员会的吉姆·里施(R-Idaho)和鲍勃·梅嫩德斯(D-N.J .)在7月下旬给总统的一封信中写道:“如果你宣布的90天努力没有得出美国高度信任的结论，我们敦促你指示情报界继续优先考虑这项调查，直到这些结论成为可能。
当被问及这份报告的发布时，白宫新闻秘书珍·普萨基(Jen Psaki)表示，需要“几天”的时间才能形成一份非机密和经过整理的版本，但各机构正在“迅速准备”
由于没有关于病毒起源的确切证据，科学家和政策制定者都只能进行推测。第一批新冠肺炎病毒群出现在武汉的湿市场附近，在那里，外来野生动物被近距离出售，这为病毒从动物传播到人类提供了充足的机会，就像过去的疫情一样。
专家表示，目前还没有确定新冠肺炎的直接动物宿主，如果有，可能需要数年才能找到。虽然武汉市场的环境样本检测呈阳性，但被检测的动物样本没有。专家说，更早的传播和更广泛的社区内的传播表明，市场不是大流行的最初来源。
2019年夏末秋初，卫星图与美国广播公司独家分享的数据显示，武汉主要医院周围的汽车流量急剧上升——这表明病毒可能早在世界警觉之前就已经传播了。据了解此事的消息人士透露，美国情报官员早在2019年11月底就已经警告称，一种传染病正在席卷该地区，改变了生活和商业模式，并对民众构成威胁。
实验室泄漏理论的支持者指出了在中国科学院武汉病毒研究所进行的功能增益研究，这是一项有争议的研究，它放大了病毒的效力，以了解如何更好地中和它。他们还指出了对WIV设施生物安全的担忧，那里的研究人员研究了与新型冠状病毒96%相似的蝙蝠冠状病毒样本，以及2019年11月因“与新冠肺炎和常见季节性疾病症状一致”住院的实验室工作人员。
然而，人畜共患疾病的倡导者强调，这4%的差异意味着一个基因差异的世界首席研究员史坚持说，她对她的所有工人进行了抗体检测，所有检测结果均为阴性。
尽管面临着接近公众所期望的、立法者在7月份的信中要求的“高度信任”的压力，但这种确定性仍然难以捉摸——这是国家情报总监艾薇儿·海恩斯在今年夏天早些时候接受雅虎新闻采访时所预言的。
“我们希望找到一个确凿的证据，”海恩斯说。“这样做很有挑战性。”
Biden briefed on US intel assessment of COVID-19's origins
President Joe Biden has been briefed on a classified report from his intelligence community probing the origins of COVID-19, White House officials told ABC News.
As the assessment made its way to Biden's desk, intelligence agencies were working in tandem to prepare an unclassified summary for public consumption, officials said.
The delivery of the assessment met the deadline for Biden's 90-day deeper dig into the virus' origins, which was launched when the president directed intelligence agencies in May to "redouble their efforts" after prior efforts failed to yield a definitive conclusion.
But with one deadline met, international scientists tasked with studying the virus' origins warned Wednesday that another crucial window is "closing fast": the shrinking opportunity for any thorough scientific study to be completed. As time wears on, potential evidence wanes, and tracing back biologic breadcrumbs will yield diminishing returns, said more than ten of the authors of a World Health Organization-led report that is urging action to "fast-track the follow-up scientific work required" for better answers by the WHO.
Assessing the intelligence and raw data available this spring, it became apparent to Biden and his top officials thata large cache of informationhad yet to be fully analyzed, officials told ABC News -- including potential evidence that could hold clues to the virus that has now claimed more than four million lives worldwide.
Consensus among top officials in the Biden administration has been that the pandemic originated in one of two ways: The virus emerged from human contact with an infected animal, or from a laboratory accident.
But with no "smoking gun" and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.
Following Biden'scall for clarityin May, intelligence agencies have spent the last three months poring over an untapped trove of information, and have amassed classified records and communications, genomic fingerprints of the virus, and early signals as to where and when the virus may have flared up first.
Biden's August deadline marks zero hour for the next phase of a larger international quest: to trace back the virus in order to hold the responsible parties to account, and to understand its inception in order to prevent the next one.
Any emerging answers, however, come amid a roiling geopolitical debate, as COVID-19's origins have become a contentious wedge issue at home -- while abroad, the Chinese government vehemently denies the virus could have come from one of its labs.
"What the U.S. cares about is not facts and truth, but how to consume and malign China," Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday ahead of the U.S. report, claiming that China had welcomed collaborative research which "laid the foundation for the next-phase global origins tracing work."
The Chinese government rejected the World Health Organization's proposed audits of Wuhan's labs in July, part of the UN agency's recommended phase two study -- saying they could not accept needless "repetitive research" when "clear conclusions" had already been reached.
But there have been no definitive conclusions as to where COVID-19 came from. The joint WHO-led team presented a range of options in their March report, calling a lab leak "extremely unlikely," but offering pathways for further investigation. Team members have voiced frustration with the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government -- echoed ininternational criticismthat politics had stymied science.
Since then, the WHO has become increasingly receptive to the possibility that the virus resulted from a lab leak. In July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that ruling out a lab leak theory was "premature" and recommended audits of the Wuhan labs in further studies. China's subsequent rebuff left the WHO to proceed without them.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has underscored that the U.S. will continue the "diplomatic spadework" of rallying support for the WHO-led study -- while warning that the administration will not accept Beijing's stonewalling.
"Either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators in to do the real work of figuring out where [COVID-19] came from, or they will face isolation in the international community," Sullivan told Fox News in June.
A group of bipartisan lawmakers urged Biden not to let this month's deadline hamstring a thorough investigation.
"If the 90-day effort you have announced does not yield conclusions in which the United States has a high degree of confidence, we urge you to direct the intelligence community to continue prioritizing this inquiry until such conclusions are possible," Sens. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a late July letter to the president.
Asked about the report's release, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it would take "several days" for an unclassified and collated version to come together, but that agencies were working "expeditiously to prepare that."
With no definitive proof of the virus' origin, scientists and policymakers alike have been left to speculate. Some of the first COVID-19 clusters occurred around Wuhan's wet markets, where exotic wild fare was sold in close quarters, offering ample opportunity for the virus to jump from animals to humans, as in past epidemics.
No direct animal host for COVID-19 has been identified, and if there is one, it could take years to find, experts say. While environmental samples from the Wuhan markets tested positive, animal samples that were tested did not. Transmission earlier on and within the wider community would suggest the market was not the original source of the pandemic, experts say.
In late summer and early autumn of 2019,satellite imageryshared exclusively with ABC showed dramatic spikes in auto traffic around major Wuhan hospitals -- suggesting the virus may have been spreading long before the world was alerted. U.S. intelligence officials had already been warning that a contagion was sweeping through the region as far back as late November 2019, changing patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the populations, according to sources briefed on the matter.
Proponents of the lab-leak theory point to gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a controversial study that amplifies a virus' potency to understand how to neutralize it better. They also point to concerns over biosafety at the WIV's facilities, where researchers had worked with bat coronavirus samples 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2 -- as well as workers at the lab who were hospitalized with "symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses" in November 2019.
Advocates of zoonotic origin, however, emphasize that the 4% discrepancy means a world of genetic difference -- and WIV lead researcher Shi Zhengli insists that she tested all her workers for COVID-19 antibodies, and all tests came back negative.
Despite pressure to approach the "high degree of confidence" desired by the public and requested in the lawmakers' July letter, such certainty remains elusive -- something presaged by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in an interview with Yahoo News earlier this summer.
"We're hoping to find a smoking gun," Haines said. "It's challenging to do that."
