The Covid pandemic likely began with a lab leak, the Department of Energy reportedly concluded in a classified report recently delivered to the White House and some members of Congress.

The report, first obtained by the Wall Street Journal, says the Department’s intelligence points toward an accident in a Wuhan laboratory as the most likely source of the novel coronavirus that brought the world to a crashing halt in 2020.

The disease has been responsible for the deaths of more than 6 million people worldwide and more than 600 million infections. That the virus could have escaped from a lab in China was dismissed by most health authorities shortly after the onset of the pandemic as a right-wing conspiracy theory.

The virus first infected humans in November of 2019 at Wuhan, China. Two months later, in late January, the government of Communist China placed the city on a full lockdown. Within a week of the lockdown, the first report of Covid in America was recorded.

Two months later, much of the country found itself working remotely — with businesses and schools closed indefinitely at the order of governors and health authorities.

The Department of Energy and the FBI are the only two government agencies that maintain a lab leak is the most likely origin. The Department of Energy’s new report states its findings with “low confidence,” while the FBI’s 2021 report states its findings with “moderate confidence.”

Neither agency, however, believes that the lab leak was related to the development of bio-weapons, as some have suggested.

The president’s national security advisor, Jacob Sullivan, said there are “variety of views in the intelligence community” about the origins of the virus. 

“A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information,” Mr. Sullivan said of intelligence agencies on CNN Sunday morning.

Several other executive agencies still hold that the epidemic started with an animal transmission of the virus. A popular theory has been that it originated in bats sold from Wuhan’s wet markets. Some hypothesize that the poor hygiene in the market allowed animals to pass the disease onto carnivorous consumers.

The intelligence community has not found a confirmed animal source for this theory. President Biden has pushed intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts in finding the origin of the disease.

Meanwhile, the national emergency declarations for Covid are set to expire on May 11.