More than six years after COVID-19 emerged in China and killed millions worldwide, newly released intelligence records show that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) was evaluating a detailed lab-origin scenario as early as March 2020 — weeks into the pandemic and well before the issue became a subject of public debate.
Dated March 27, 2020 — just 16 days after COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic — the DIA “Authoritative Assessment” appears as part of a slide deck and supporting material shared among analysts and senior officials within the Defense Department’s intelligence arm.
The assessment focuses heavily on the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and its leading coronavirus researcher, Zhengli Shi, whose laboratory for years conducted high-risk experiments on wild bat coronaviruses.
The never-before-published details were revealed in bits and pieces over the last three months in court-ordered productions of COVID-19 origins intelligence records released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by U.S. Right To Know more than a year and a half ago.
The new details bring added context to slides that were previously released in early 2025, showing they were part of a broader, evolving assessment on the pandemic’s roots that the DIA had been shaping for months.
On a previously published slide headed “Hypothetical Laboratory Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the assessment sketches a step-by-step timeline of real and speculative work at the WIV that explains the techniques for how the virus that caused the pandemic could plausibly have been created in a lab with insufficient biosecurity containment.
It then posits that an uncharacterized virus escaped in mid-2019, sparking the outbreak, and that the WIV later published disinformation that analysts speculated helped to bolster a natural-origin narrative.
On a final slide titled “Concluding Points” — also previously released, but now shown to be part of the March 2020 assessment package — a comment bubble appended to a list of observations about WIV’s capabilities reads:
“The molecular biology capabilities of WIV and the genomic assessment are consistent with the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-engineered virus that was part of a bank of chimeric viruses in Zhengli Shi’s laboratory at WIV that escaped from containment.”
The new material also shows the DIA’s detailed early assessment circulated through the agency’s top ranks just weeks into the pandemic, but the DIA’s official position remained that the virus’s origins were “unknown.”
Hellbound and Down 