BUT WHAT DOES HUNTER'S LAPTOP SAY?:

On that teleconference -- the first known effort by senior U.S. and international health officials to determine whether human engineering or a laboratory leak might explain the emergence of the virus -- most of the experts, including Fauci, concluded that the virus had probably evolved in nature and was transmitted from an animal to a human, Collins said in an interview.

The effort continued over the following weeks, when the scientists unanimously concluded there was no evidence of lab manipulation. The teleconference, which has not been previously reported, was the beginning of an ongoing, sometimes politicized and so far fruitless effort inside the U.S. government to determine whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, could be the result of engineering or a lab leak.

Many more scientists would come not only to discount the "lab leak" theory but dismiss it as the unfounded projection of President Donald Trump, who in the pandemic's early days publicly claimed that the virus may have emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, where the first known cases of the novel coronavirus were found.

Despite the early scientific consensus supporting natural origin, interest in the lab-leak theory never fully abated inside the U.S. government. Public health officials, intelligence officers and officials at the State Department and the National Security Council labored, with varying degrees of intensity and success, to understand the origins of the virus and whether it may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a world-renowned center for coronavirus research.

Most of what they learned came from public sources of information, including news articles, social media and scientific journals. Within the classified realm, a significant amount of the intelligence the United States obtained came from foreign governments, according to former officials with knowledge of the matter.

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