Biden to be briefed on intelligence community COVID origin review as early as Tuesday

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President Biden is expected to receive a briefing on the origin of COVID-19 from the intelligence community as early as Tuesday.

The president announced in May that the U.S. intelligence community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios” for the origin of COVID-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” and asked for a follow-up report in 90 days.

In March, Biden received a report on the pandemic’s origin that was inconclusive and revealed internal disagreement over whether the virus jumped from animal to human or leaked from a lab.

The president in May asked the intelligence community to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion, and to report back to me in 90 days,” he said at the time.

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The intelligence community is expected to release an unclassified version of the report before the weekend.

Officials revealed in May that several workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting gain-of-function research in China’s Hubei province, fell ill in mid-November 2019, about a month before the first COVID-19 case was reported in the Chinese city.

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The Wall Street Journal also reported that some of the Wuhan Institute of Virology workers who fell ill in 2019 required hospital care, lending weight to what some have dubbed the “lab-leak theory,” citing previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence documents.

The virology lab built an archive of genetic information about bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and has faced criticism over its transparency throughout the pandemic.

Fox News’ Kelly Chernenkoff, Brooke Singman and Talia Kaplan contributed to this report.