Spy Chiefs Say They Don’t Know How Virus Started, But That China Has Not Been ‘Fully Transparent’ American spy officials said Wednesday that the intelligence community is still unsure how the coronavirus first spread to human populations, though they are confident that the Chinese government has not been transparent about the matter. “The intelligence community does not know exactly where, when or how COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially,” Avril Haines, the director for national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee during a hearing on global national security threats. She had been asked by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, the vice-chairman of the Senate panel, about the possibility that the virus emerged from a leak in a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.