The report from the investigation concludes that the virus had an artificial origin and spread as a result of a leak from the Chinese city of Wuhan, which houses a leading research facility that has practiced "gain-of-function virus enhancement at inadequate levels of biosafety" for years.
The report notes that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were infected with a similar virus as early as the fall of 2019, several months before the widespread outbreak of COVID-19 began.
The virus possesses unique characteristics not found in nature, and all cases of infection stem from a single source, whereas previous pandemics had multiple variants of transmission, according to the authors of the document.