On Friday evening, five days after a federally mandated deadline, the US government’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally acted on its legal obligation to “declassify any and all information” regarding the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and its possible links to a Wuhan laboratory complex.

In the three-plus years since COVID upended the lives of virtually every person on Earth, a sprawling and often bitter debate has arisen among scientists, politicians, journalists, and online analysts over where the virus came from. Those favoring a “natural spillover” theory, in which the virus made the leap from bats to humans via an intermediate animal, have been dueling with “lab leak” proponents, who contend that it likely escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducts cutting-edge and sometimes risky coronavirus research.

Many hoped that the declassification exercise would bring new clarity—and maybe even resolution—to the debate. But when the ODNI finally weighed in at 6:25 pm Eastern Time on Friday, one thing seemed clear: the debate, accusations, and investigations will continue, perhaps indefinitely, in scientific papers, Twitter threads, and congressional hearings.

Instead of releasing a tranche of redacted primary documents chronicling the agencies’ respective investigations, the ODNI chose to publish a summary of findings in a report of just nine pages, four of them taken up by a table of contents and a glossary. Among the few points of unambiguous agreement, the report notes: “All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.” As well, they concur that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was not developed as a biological weapon. The report contains a classified annex, which the ODNI did not release.

The report may be more notable for what it doesn’t say. It does not shed any light on why the National Intelligence Council and four other intelligence agencies assess that natural exposure to an infected animal is a more likely cause. It does not reveal why the FBI and Department of Energy both see a laboratory incident as more likely, or why they believe so “for different reasons.” Nor does it spell out why the CIA and another unidentified agency have declined to even make an assessment, except to say that “both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”

It’s no figure of speech to say that the COVID origins debate has been thoroughly politicized. Republicans in Congress have sought to use suspicions of a lab-leak cover-up as a cudgel against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (The National Institutes of Health, of which NIAID is a part, awarded a grant to a US-based organization, EcoHealth Alliance, that collaborated with the WIV on coronavirus research.) On Friday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic announced a subpoena issued by the Committee on Oversight and Accountability to Dr. Kristian Andersen, a virologist at Scripps Research Institute. Andersen was ordered to turn over all Slack messages related to the drafting of an influential early research paper, which Fauci reviewed, that cast a laboratory accident as implausible. Andersen and other authors of the “Proximal Origin” paper have also been summoned to testify in person before the subcommittee on July 11. (Spokespeople for Scripps and Dr. Fauci did not respond to requests for comment.)

The order directing ODNI to declassify, however, was a bipartisan enterprise. The law mandating it was passed unanimously in Congress and signed by President Biden on March 20.

Appearing on Face the Nation this Sunday, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said that the ODNI’s declassification had not met the requirements set by law: “We’ve asked to open the curtain and release the intelligence, and they went behind the curtain, read this stuff, and came out and said, ‘Well, this is what we think about it.’ This is not sufficient.” He added that the result would be “a battle between Congress and the director of national intelligence to make certain” the law is “complied with.”

Yesterday, that battle began, when two Senators who sponsored and cosponsored the COVID-19 Origin Act, Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) respectively, sent a letter to ODNI director Avril Haines, alleging that she failed to comply with the law. They invited her to “try again” and deliver a more fulsome declassification within seven business days, or testify before Congress.

Dr. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, tells Vanity Fair that the report leaves him “scratching my head at the level of capability or incapability [of the intelligence community] to conduct an investigation regarding science.” He adds that the agencies’ reasoning “should be in this report.” Why, he asks, are the assessments “all so different? Why did they come to various conclusions? Were they looking at the same intelligence and, big question, who did [they] talk to?”

The office of Representative Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the Select Subcommittee, did not respond to an interview request. But in a letter he sent to Wenstrup on June 8, first published by The Washington Post, he accused the Republican-led subcommittee of pursuing a “predetermined narrative that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins were part of a lab-created and leaked SARS-CoV-2 virus and then nefariously worked to suppress information and cover up how the pandemic began.” (Collins did not respond to a request for comment sent to NIH, where he served as director for more than 12 years.) The ODNI did not respond to requests from Vanity Fair to discuss how the declassification process was conducted or to respond to congressional claims that its declassification did not comply with the law.

In the first year of the pandemic, at a time when the lab-leak hypothesis was widely condemned as a baseless conspiracy theory, a group of officials within the State Department fought to release evidence suggestive of a research-related incident. One of those officials was David Feith, a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the East Asia bureau under Trump. Feith describes the declassification report as a missed opportunity and part of a “years-long and escalating effort to undermine the public interest in knowing more about where one of the most catastrophic events in history appears to have originated.” He says the US government has failed “to operate with due transparency and candor” about its central role in funding risky virology research, “not only in the US but in China and even at the very Wuhan lab that has been obviously in question for three-and-a-half years.”

But Rear Admiral Kenneth Bernard, who established the National Security Council’s first biodefense and health security office in 1998 under President Bill Clinton, said the intelligence agencies “really don’t know what the origin is, no matter how aghast the Twittersphere is at the lack of forthcoming [information].” Rather than a lack of transparency, he detects a lack of interest. “Once they concluded this wasn’t development of an offensive biological weapon, the intelligence community became relatively uninterested, as did the administration.” Whether it came from a natural outbreak or an inadvertent laboratory leak in China would not significantly change the policy approach, Bernard says. “Both origin stories—of a market or lab origin—implicate China in not giving proper oversight to a dangerous practice.”

The report represents the placid tip of a large, disputatious iceberg. Its carefully hedged language points to “continuing divisions of interpretation within the intelligence agencies,” says Bernard.

“Collectively, the DNI is saying that both hypotheses are plausible,” says Gerald Parker, who previously led the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland. “That is the consensus opinion they could come up with. The intelligence agencies are analyzing information they’re getting through their channels. If they say, ‘There’s no direct evidence SARS-CoV-2 was in the lab before December 2019,’ it doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just means they don’t have direct evidence of it.”

The report notes that several WIV researchers fell ill in the fall of 2019 with some symptoms that were “consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19.” That information, first disclosed in a January 2021 State Department fact sheet, recently broke into the news when first a Substack publication, and then the Wall Street Journal, identified the sick researchers as three people who had done work in the lab of the WIV’s top coronavirus scientist. Two of them subsequently told Science magazine that they had not been ill in the fall of 2019. (Vanity Fair emailed all three for comment, as well as the lab’s top coronavirus scientist, but received no reply.)

The report also acknowledges biosafety concerns at the WIV: a shortage of appropriately trained staff; a probable lack of inadequate biosafety precautions; and efforts to improve training as well as systems for disinfection and ventilation in response to problems that had been identified. A report worked on by a Senate committee’s Republican staff documented these issues and argued that they prompted high-level concern within China’s government, as evidenced by a visit to the WIV from a senior Beijing biosafety official in November 2019. The ODNI report says that the visit “appears routine, rather than a response to a specific incident.”

It also finds that an inspection at the laboratory that identified problems after the pandemic began is “not necessarily indicative of WIV’s biosafety status prior to the outbreak.”

Florence Débarre, a senior scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has been studying COVID origins with an international team of scientists who contend the pandemic began with a natural spillover. In her view, the declassification offered little evidence to support the lab-leak hypothesis. “To learn that nothing has been found is an important piece of information,” Débarre says. “There is no evidence that the WIV had SARS-CoV-2 before late December 2019. There is no evidence that there were accidents at the WIV in November 2019; no evidence there were three sick researchers with COVID” in a coronavirus lab group.

Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona, cowrote an influential research paper which used a geospatial analysis of early cases in Wuhan to argue that the virus originated at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market there, leaping from infected animals to humans to start the pandemic. He believes that the natural-origin hypothesis is the only explanation that comports with the available data. “I didn’t have any expectation that there would be major revelations that would change my thinking,” he says of the declassification, adding that there is “very clear scientific evidence” that the virus “started with wildlife sales at one of the four markets in Wuhan consistently selling these live animals.”

In the days since the ODNI report was issued, several commentators have attempted to use its sparse and couched language to conclusively dismiss the lab-leak hypothesis. But the four agencies, including the National Intelligence Council, that favor a natural origin do so only with low confidence. Clearly, the intelligence agencies don’t think that the evidence of a natural origin is “dispositive,” says Bernard. “Low confidence means it’s barely over the 50/50 line.”

David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State Department, helped lead the review there that ended in January 2021. He says during that time, “We asked the intelligence community for information pertinent to natural origins, full stop: What did they know? I can’t tell you what they knew, but I never saw a scintilla of evidence showing a natural origin.” He says that, by contrast, the State Department team had more information two and a half years ago indicating a lab leak than is reflected in the current declassification, and he claims that some of that information still has not been disseminated.

The strongest assessment, of moderate confidence, comes from the FBI, which views a lab leak as more likely. Of all the intelligence agencies, says Parker, the FBI has the most experience in investigating biological threats including lab breaches and purposeful attacks. “The FBI has established laboratories to support this work, and has developed procedures and protocols,” he says, in part due to its experience investigating the 2001 anthrax attacks. (Parker was an expert adviser on the GOP Senate report released earlier this year.)

Two congressional investigators tell VF that, according to records they have reviewed, the FBI appears to have done the most legwork of any intelligence agency in formulating its assessment. The records, which document interviews and meetings with outside experts, have not been made public. Another expert cautions that the FBI’s emphasis on law enforcement may bias its assessment.

Since the pandemic began, the intelligence community’s few public disclosures have evolved slightly over time, exposing small shifts in how the different agencies weigh different evidence, depending on their expertise. The most notable shift was that of the Department of Energy, which changed its assessment from undecided to low confidence that a lab leak had occurred, according to “fresh intelligence,” as the Wall Street Journal reported in February. The Energy Department oversees a network of 17 national labs, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which possesses advanced national security capabilities.

On April 30, 2020, the ODNI put out a statement that the intelligence community “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified” but would continue to assess “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

If a “scientific consensus” ever really existed, it has long since fractured. The declassified report now says that “almost all IC agencies” believe SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered, and “most agencies” believe it was not adapted in a laboratory using scientific techniques that can hasten evolutionary change in a virus. But the report notes that some agencies are “unable to make a determination” on these points.

“The fact that it’s proven so challenging to answer this question in a way that is satisfying to everyone highlights that the capabilities in the United States and internationally to resolve these kinds of open questions are very weak,” says Jaime Yassif, vice president of global biological policy and programs for the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “We have a lot of work to do domestically and internationally to shore up our capabilities.”

How, then, will the US arrive at something approaching a resolution on the origins of COVID-19, and who will the ultimate adjudicators be? Parker says, “Nothing short of a bipartisan, congressionally authorized commission will suffice, and I am not sure even that will any more.”

Additional reporting by Katherine Li.