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The U.S. government still has not reached a consensus on how the coronavirus pandemic started, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters Monday — despite news reports that the Energy Department has concluded the virus most likely leaked from a lab in China. “The intelligence community and the rest of the government is still looking at this,” Kirby said. “There’s not been a definitive conclusion, so it’s difficult for me to say — nor should I feel like I should have to defend press reporting about a possible preliminary indication here. What the president wants is facts.” (McCarthy, 2/27)

The pandemic’s true origin may never be uncovered, despite a new assessment favoring the lab leak theory from the US Department of Energy, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Monday. ... The “fireside chat” between Fauci and Anna Kuchment, the Globe’s medical and biotechnology editor, was the first event in the Globe’s series of online seminars celebrating advances in science and technology. In December, Fauci stepped down as NIAID chief and also as President Biden’s chief medical adviser. (Freyer, 2/27)

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Trump administration, on Monday backed a controversial reported assessment from the Department of Energy “low confidence” finding that COVID-19 likely began with a lab leak in Wuhan, China. U.S. media organizations cited unnamed sources saying the department had such a report based on new intelligence. (Vaziri, 2/27)

China on Tuesday said it has been “open and transparent” in the search for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and dismissed U.S. criticism as politicizing the issue. China had “shared the most data and research results on virus tracing and made important contributions to global virus tracing research,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning Mao told reporters at a daily briefing. (2/28)

Even at low confidence, however, the Energy Department’s analysis carries weight. For its assessment, the department drew on the expertise of a team assembled from the U.S. national laboratory complex, which employs tens of thousands of scientists representing many technical specialties, from physics and data analysis to genomics and molecular biology. The labs were established as part of the U.S. nuclear weapons program and operate largely in the classified realm. The department’s cadre of technical experts includes members of the Energy Department’s Z-Division, which since the 1960s has been involved in secretive investigations of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons threats by U.S. adversaries, including China and Russia. (Warrick, Nakashima and Harris, 2/27)

National security adviser Jake Sullivan declined to confirm or deny the news of the Energy Department report to media outlets. Sullivan told CNN on Sunday that President Biden has requested the Department of Energy's national labs to be "brought into this assessment," because he "wants to put every tool at use to be able to figure out what happened here." (2/27)

The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the report. All 18 offices of the U.S. intelligence community had access to the information the DOE used in reaching its assessment. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, said she isn’t sure what new intelligence the agencies had, but “it’s reasonable to infer” it relates to activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. She said a 2018 research proposal co-authored by scientists there and their U.S. collaborators “essentially described a blueprint for COVID-like viruses.” (Ungar and Jalonick, 2/28)

The lab-leak theory lives! Or better put: It never dies. In response to new but unspecified intelligence, the U.S. Department of Energy has changed its assessment of COVID-19’s origins: The agency, which had previously been undecided on the matter, now rates a laboratory mishap ahead of a natural spillover event as the suspected starting point. That conclusion, first reported over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal, matches up with findings from the FBI, and also a Senate Minority report out last fall that called the pandemic, “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.” (Engber, 2/28)