We may never know where COVID originated. Here's why

A classified intelligence report from the U.S. Department of Energy that concluded the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a laboratory leak may give a boost to those who support the theory, but scientists say it certainly won't end the debate over the origin of the virus.

Indeed, some say a definitive answer may never be found.

"There are many cold criminal cases that never get solved, despite intense efforts to do so because they don't have sufficient evidence as to what happened. I think you have a very similar situation here," said Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

"We're never really going to know." 

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University and director of the university's World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law agreed that it's very unlikely the origin will ever be solved.

"I think historians will look back and they will think of it as one of the great failures of the pandemic," he said.

Many scientists believe the virus had a natural origin, what's known as a zoonotic or natural spillover, meaning the virus came from animals, mutated and jumped into people — as has happened with viruses in the past.

The lab-leak theory proposes that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which works with coronaviruses, may have been studying or even modifying such viruses to better understand them, when one may have accidentally escaped the lab.

Though it was initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory, the notion of a lab leak is now considered by some in the scientific community an avenue at least worth exploring. 

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a report noting that the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees a national network of labs, had concluded with "low confidence" that the pandemic began as a result of a lab leak.

The Wall Street Journal said the classified report was based on new intelligence.

Past intelligence reports indicate that a low confidence level generally means that the information used in the analysis is "scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information" and could also mean that the intelligence community has significant concerns or problems with the information sources.

John Kirby, the spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, said Monday that there is currently no consensus in the U.S. government about how exactly the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Meanwhile, in an interview with Fox News Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the origin of the virus was "most likely" a result of a laboratory incident in Wuhan, a position the agency reaffirmed in a tweet on the same day.