Researchers hospitalized at Wuhan lab in 2019: Report

Three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were hospitalized in November 2019, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report. 

The report goes beyond a State Department fact sheet issued during the final days of former President Donald Trump's administration, which said the staffers became sick in autumn 2019 "with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness," the Wall Street Journal reported.

Intelligence officials differed on the degree of evidence supporting the report's credibility, with one unidentified official telling the outlet the claims required further substantiation while another described the intelligence as strong.

“The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” he said, referring to the researchers.

Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said that the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus, and both administrations have cast doubt on the manner in which the study from China and the World Health Organization was conducted in early 2021. Though the WHO-China report said a jump from animals to humans was most likely, Trump officials have pointed to an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab as a highly plausible origin for the pandemic.

In March, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the WHO, said the joint team had not fully investigated the potential of COVID-19 originating through an accidental leak from the lab, insisting the hypothesis needed further study despite the possibility being deemed "extremely unlikely" by the team, which claimed the most likely origin was a jump from animal to animal to human.