No definitive conclusion on COVID-19 origin theory: White House

There is no definitive conclusion on the origin of COVID-19, the White House said on Monday, a day after the US Department of Energy said in a media release that the coronavirus likely originated from a leak from a Chinese laboratory.

“The intelligence community and the rest of the government are still looking at it. There hasn't been a definitive conclusion, so it's hard for me to say, nor do I feel like I should be defending the press reports here about a possible preliminary indication," National Security Council Strategic Communications Coordinator John Kirby told in the White paper House press conference.

Kirby was responding to questions about the Energy Department's finding that the lab leak most likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic, first reported by The Wall Street Journal over the weekend. "The president wants facts. He wants the whole government to come to these facts, and that's what we're doing. And we're just not there yet. And when we're there, and if we have something that's ready to inform the American people and Congress, then we will," he said.

Kirby said President Joe Biden made trying to find the origin of COVID a priority as soon as he came into office. And it has the efforts of the whole government created for it, he said. "There is currently no consensus within the US government on exactly how COVID started. There is simply no intelligence community consensus," he said.

“The president thinks it's really important that we continue this work and find out as best we can how it started so that we can better prevent future pandemics. The idea is to get ahead of it, so if there was another or even signs of another, we could better get ahead of it,” he said.

In response to another question about China, Kirby said that one of the things that concerns the US about the spy balloon episode, apart from the fact that it was clearly designed for high-altitude spying over potentially sensitive military sites, is that communications were not so open, especially on the military side, as needed.

"So the president says his goal in the relationship is competition, not conflict." That didn't change after the spy balloon incident. But one of the things that really... We have to make progress in opening up the lines of communication, especially in the military-to-military way. And as you know, the Chinese shut them down after then-Speaker Pelosi went to Taiwan,” he said.