MOSCOW, September 2. /TASS/. The US intelligence community’s report on the origin of the novel coronavirus hinders the development of joint approaches to the struggle against the pandemic and breeds tensions, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news briefing on Thursday.

"I have to note with regret that this publication [of the US intelligence report] has triggered another spiral of insinuations over an important and purely scientific issue. Russia has all along warned against politicizing the situation involving research into the sources of the novel coronavirus infection. Such steps breed tensions in society and on the international scene and hinder the development of common approaches to resisting the spreading infection," Zakharova said, when asked for a comment on the report in question.

"We believe it is essential to focus on ways of developing international cooperation for the sake of victory over the pandemic, and not use a universal human tragedy for settling scores at the interstate level or for manipulating the public opinion," she stressed. "We hope for joint work with all countries concerned for the sake of preventing extreme situations in the field of public health."

An unclassified version of the US intelligence community’s report summarizing special services’ conclusions regarding the origin of the coronavirus was uploaded to the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday. The document says the coronavirus was not developed as a biological weapon. At the same time US intelligence services have not achieved unanimity regarding the virus’s origin and a certain divergence of opinion remains. At the same time, they acknowledged that most likely they will be unable to produce a final judgement regarding the origin of the virus without China’s cooperation.

US President Joe Biden said last May that the US intelligence community lacked sufficient information to say with certainty how exactly the SARS-CoV-2 began to spread: as a result of transfer from infected animals to humans or of some incident at the laboratory of China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The US leader then instructed the special services to redouble efforts with the aim of scrutinizing all available data and drafting another report within 90 days. The secret version of the report was submitted to Biden on Tuesday.