By Dan Whitcomb
(Reuters) -U.S.&nbsp;intelligence&nbsp;agencies found no&nbsp;direct&nbsp;evidence&nbsp;that the&nbsp;COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China's&nbsp;Wuhan&nbsp;Institute of Virology, a&nbsp;report&nbsp;declassified on Friday said.
The four-page&nbsp;report&nbsp;by the Office of the&nbsp;Director of National&nbsp;Intelligence&nbsp;(ODNI) said the U.S.&nbsp;intelligence&nbsp;community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus&nbsp;came from a&nbsp;laboratory, however, and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic.
"The Central&nbsp;Intelligence&nbsp;Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the&nbsp;COVID-19 pandemic, as both (natural and&nbsp;lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting&nbsp;reporting," the ODNI&nbsp;report&nbsp;said.
The&nbsp;report&nbsp;said that while "extensive work" had been conducted on coronaviruses at the&nbsp;Wuhan&nbsp;institute (WIV), the agencies had not found&nbsp;evidence&nbsp;of a specific incident that could have caused the outbreak.
"We continue to have no indication that the WIV's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any&nbsp;direct&nbsp;evidence&nbsp;that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the&nbsp;COVID&nbsp;pandemic," the&nbsp;report&nbsp;said.
The origins of the coronavirus&nbsp;pandemic have been a matter of furious&nbsp;debate in the United States almost since the first human cases were&nbsp;reported in&nbsp;Wuhan&nbsp;in late 2019.
U.S. President Joe Biden in March signed a bill declassifying information related to the origins of the pandemic.
Biden said at the time of signing that he shared Congress' goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin of&nbsp;COVID-19.
The debate was refueled by a Wall Street Journal&nbsp;report&nbsp;in February that the U.S. Energy Department had assessed with "low confidence" in a classified&nbsp;intelligence&nbsp;report&nbsp;that the pandemic most likely arose from a Chinese&nbsp;laboratory leak, an assessment Beijing denies.
FBI&nbsp;director Christopher Wray said on Feb. 28 his agency had assessed for some time that the origins of the pandemic were "most likely a potential&nbsp;lab&nbsp;incident" in the Chinese city of&nbsp;Wuhan. China said this claim had "no credibility whatsoever".
As of March 20, four other U.S. agencies still judged that&nbsp;COVID-19 was likely the result of natural transmission, while two were undecided.
(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Jacqueline Wong)

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No direct evidence COVID started in Wuhan lab - US intelligence report