It's unclear exactly how or when US intelligence agencies gained access to the information, but the machines involved in creating and processing this kind of genetic data from viruses are typically connected to external cloud-based servers -- leaving open the possibility they were hacked, sources said.
Officials conducting the 90-day review hope this information will help answer the question of how the virus jumped from animals to humans. Unlocking that mystery is essential to ultimately determining whether Covid-19 leaked from the lab or was transmitted to humans from animals in the wild, multiple sources told CNN.
"Basically in [a 2020 research paper published in Nature], the WIV talked about all the sequences they had up until a certain point in time -- it's what most scientists virologists believe, that's pretty much what they had," said Dr. Robert Garry, a virologist at the Tulane University School of Medicine.
Intelligence officials are tasked with addressing several"scientific knowledge gaps" about the virus' evolution, according to the collection guidance governing the 90-day push, distributed to more than a dozen agencies on June 11 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and obtained by CNN.
Many scientists continue to believe that the most likely scenario is that the virus jumped from animals to humans naturally. But despite testing thousands of animals, researchers still haven't identified the intermediate host through which the virus passed as it adapted to humans. Understanding exactly which viruses researchers at the WIV were working on could provide important evidence for any one of these theories. It's one of the reasons that investigators on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have been keenly focused on the database that was taken offline in 2019.
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