After years of speculation and accusations, a declassified report released by the U.S. government finds that the covid-19 virus originated from the Wuhan lab in China.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence on June 16 released its in-depth report examining potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the coronorvirus pandemic. 

The report, which runs 10 pages, stated that the U.S. Intelligence Community discovered “biosafety concerns” present at the Wuhan laboratory and concluded that “genetic engineering” of coronavirus was indeed taking place at the Chinese facility where researchers affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army also performed work, The New York Times reported. The People’s Liberation Army is the principal military force of the People’s Republic of China and the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

According to the report, some scientists at the Wuhan lab became ill in the fall of 2019 with symptoms “consistent with but not diagnostic of covid-19.” 

Intelligence agencies do not think the case of three lab workers who became ill in 2019 can help reveal whether the covid-19 pandemic originated from an accidental lab leak, according to a report made public Friday.

Yet, according to assessments by both the Department of Energy and the FBI, it is believed that a laboratory leak incident was the most probable cause of the initial human infection of covid-19.

“Scientists have suggested that SARS-Cov-2 is the result of a recombination between two different viruses, one close to RaTG13 (from a bat) and the other related to a Pangolin virus. In other words, it is a chimera between the two existing viruses,” another senior member on the same committee on Intelligence told The New York Post.

“Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon,” the report read.

But the report stressed that “Almost all IC [intelligence community] agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.”

The new report was three years in the making and is the result of a bipartisan law that ordered intelligence agencies to release a declassified version of what they know about whether covid might have been created inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then accidentally escaped from the laboratory, The New York Times reported.

In this Feb. 2, 2021, file photo, a member of a World Health Organization team is seen wearing protective gear during a field visit to the Hubei Animal Disease Control and Prevention Center for another day of field visit in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province. A joint WHO-China study on the origins of COVID-19 says that transmission from bats to humans through another animal is the most likely scenario and that a lab leak is “extremely unlikely,” according to a draft copy obtained by The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)