US President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered national intelligence agencies to report to him in the next three months on whether COVID-19 first emerged in China from an animal source or from a laboratory accident
Agencies should "redouble their efforts to collect and analyse information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days," Mr Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
According to Mr Biden, agencies are currently split over the two possible sources for the virus that swept the planet over the past year, killing more than 3.4 million people - a figure experts say is undoubtedly an underestimate.
Mr Biden's order signals an escalation in mounting controversy over how the virus first emerged - through animal contact at a market in Wuhan, China, or through release of the coronavirus from a highly secure research laboratory in the same city.
The answer has immense implications both for China, which says it is not responsible for the pandemic, and for the United States.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) previously funded bat coronavirus research in Wuhan, but has denied supporting "gain of function" experiments that involve modifying a virus so that it becomes more transmissible to humans.
The grant was terminated last year by the administration of former president Donald Trump.
The lab theory has been used by opposition Republicans to attack top US scientists, including the NIH's Anthony Fauci, and Beijing, which strongly denies the claims.
Mr Biden said that in March he asked for a report on the origins of the virus, including "whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident."
"As of today, the US intelligence community has 'coalesced around two likely scenarios' but has not reached a definitive conclusion on this question," he said.
White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Mr Biden was informed by the intelligence community of their assessment about a month ago, but it was classified information until now.
Asked about the government's position on whether the virus was deliberately engineered to become a bioweapon, she said: "We haven't ruled out anything yet."
Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne welcomed Mr Biden's statement but would not buy into whether our intelligence agencies held such a view.
"We will continue to work with our international partners including the United States, with whom we share concerns on this," she told ABC radio.
"The most important thing is that we are able to provide for the international community an assurance that a pandemic of this nature can't happen again because we do understand where it came from and how it happened, and that we do ensure we're all better prepared."
Lab theory gains traction
The lab leak theory has angered China, with foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Wednesday hitting out and accusing Washington of "spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation."
Nevertheless, the idea is gaining increasing traction in the United States, where it was initially fueled by Trump and his aides and dismissed by many as a political talking point.
Citing a US intelligence report, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that a trio from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalised with a seasonal illness in November 2019, a month before Beijing disclosed the existence of a mysterious pneumonia outbreak.
The natural origin hypothesis holds the virus emerged in bats then passed to humans, likely via an intermediary species.
This theory was widely accepted at the start of the pandemic, but as time has worn on, scientists have not found a virus in either bats or another animal that matches the genetic signature of SARS-CoV-2.
US President Joe Biden Source: AAP
This wasn't the case for SARS and MERS, earlier coronaviruses that crossed to humans and were traced back to civets and camels relatively quickly.
The United States and other countries have called for a more in-depth probe into the pandemic's origins, after a report by an international team sent by the World Health Organization to China earlier this year proved inconclusive.
And calls from independent scientists for more transparency are also growing.
"We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data," a group of researchers from top US universities wrote in a letter published by leading journal Science in mid-May.
