US intelligence inconclusive on COVID origin, validates lab-origin argument
The COVID-19 disease either emerged from a natural exposure to an infected animal or a laboratory incident, according to an unclassified summary of a report from the US intelligence community.
While the intelligence community is inconclusive on the origin, it’s in agreement that the virus was not a biological weapon and that the Chinese had no foreknowledge of the pandemic.
The US intelligence community, composed of 18 intelligence agencies under the Director of National Intelligence, was tasked with reporting on the origin of COVID-19 in 90 days by President Joe Biden in May this year. The report was submitted to the White House on Thursday and President Biden was briefed on the same day.
The report has differences from an earlier assessment of WHO investigators on the origin of COVID-19. It also highlights limitations of any US investigation as it would risk a public disclosure of years of US funding to research hotwiring viruses, including to Wuhan researchers at the centre of lab-origin hypothesis — more on this later.
US intelligence favours natural origin but doesn’t rule out lab leak
Four intelligence community elements and the National Intelligence Council assessed with low confidence that the initial coronavirus infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close ancestor of the virus that’s up to 99 per cent similar to the one that causes COVID-19, said the report.
However, one element in the intelligence community concluded a lab origin with moderate confidence and assessment of three others was that no conclusion could be reached without more evidence — either for or against the lab origin.
Moreover, two elements in the intelligence community did not rule out the possibility that the virus was genetically engineered, suggesting a lab origin, putting natural vs lab origin scales at 5:3 — five for a natural origin having a low confidence.
The unclassified summary did not disclose the confidence-level of two elements that did not rule out a possibility of biological engineering of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease.
While there are undecided elements, there is also a section that gives both the lab and natural origin an equal likelihood.
The summary highlighted that the intelligence community and the scientific fraternity across the world lack clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest COVID-19 cases in China.
“It will not be possible to provide a more definitive explanation for the origin of COVID-19 unless new information allows the analysts to determine the specific pathway for initial natural contact with an animal or to determine that a lab in Wuhan was handling novel coronavirus or a close progenitor virus before COVID-19 emerged,” said the report.
In a statement issued by the White House following the release of the summary, President Biden also highlighted that the Chinese have disallowed the world from understanding the origin of the virus through their lack of transparency and cooperation.
“Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People’s Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it,” said President Biden.
US intelligence assessment’s differences with WHO lead investigator
The US intelligence community noted that the infection was detected no later than November 2019 with “first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in China’s Wuhan in December 2019”. This is at odds with the findings of the World Health Organization’s investigators that toured China earlier this year.
Peter Ben Embarek, the lead investigator of the WHO delegation that toured China, told CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh that there were at least 13 strains of the virus in China by December 2019. While Ben Embarek refused to draw any conclusions from this, independent experts explained that more strains meant the virus had been around for some time that allowed it to mutate.
“As there was already genetic diversity in SARS-CoV-2 sequences sampled from Wuhan in December 2019, it is likely that the virus was circulating for a while longer than that month alone,” said Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney, in CNN’s story.
Ben Embarek said the Chinese had provided the WHO investigators with their analyses of 92 patients that showed severe COVID-like symptoms in October and November 2019. These cases were not found in a “cluster” as is common in case of a centralised outbreak, noted Ben Embarek, but were spread throughout Hubei, the province in which the city of Wuhan is located.
While the WHO lead investigator did not offer any conclusions from this finding, the presence of people with severe COVID-like symptoms across the province two to three months before the first known case suggests the virus was already spreading across the province.
The report is inconclusive, but it validates lab-origin argument
The idea that COVID-19 emerged from a lab was a taboo for almost a year in intellectual circles, delegated to the realm of far-right conspiracies. Understandably, much of the US media dismissed it — until earlier this year when dogged pursuit from a group of open-source investigators known as DRASTIC and persistent reporting from the likes of Rowan Jacobson, Nicholson Baker, and Katherine Eban for publications like Newsweek, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, and New York Magazine brought the argument from the fringes to the mainstream.
Nicholson Baker highlighted the Chinese had been engaged in “gain of function” research on coronaviruses for years. “Gain of function” refers to experiments that seek to work upon viruses like SARS or MERS such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and transmissibility. In simpler terms, they make the virus more lethal in labs.
Ralph Baric and Boyd Yount of the University of North Carolina “trained” a mice coronavirus to jump into hamsters. This was in the 1990s. In 2006, Baric and three others were granted a patent for their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone of SARS virus.
In 2015, Baric began working with Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, known as “Bat Woman” in China for her work on bats’ coronaviruses.
“By the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission,” highlighted Alina Chan and her co-authors, cited in Baker’s New York magazine piece. “Whereas SARS, when it first appeared in 2003, underwent ‘numerous adaptive mutations’ before settling down,” added Alina et al.
In simpler terms, SARS-CoV-2 was picture-perfect for infecting humans from the moment it emerged whereas its ancestor SARS that emerged in 2000s had to go through mutations before becoming potent for human infections.
In 2012, a virus, later identified as RaTG13, was found in a mine in Yunnan province of China, according to Shi Zhengli. The scientists made several trips to take samples from the mine and worked on those samples — and that of RaTG13 — at their lab at Wuhan.
The RaTG13 virus is 96 per cent similar to SARS-CoV-2 with one difference — the absence of the “spike protein” that SARS-CoV-2 uses to latch onto human cells.
In simpler terms, the RaTG was SARS-CoV-2 minus “whatever makes it picture-perfect to infect humans”.
In November 2015, Baric and colleagues, while working with Shi Zhengli, inserted a spike protein from a bat coronavirus through the nose into mice that had been “humanised” — meaning they inserted a bat virus into mice that were biologically humans through modified organs.
Following the nasal insertion into humanised mice, they inserted the mouse-adapted spike protein from a bat coronavirus into human airway cells.
Both of these cases caused a “robust infection”.
In simpler terms, Baric, Shi Zhengli, et al demonstrated their ability to infect a mouse from a bat-specific coronavirus and then a human — a deliberate, artificial adaption and mutation of a naturally-occurring virus.
As for the RaTG13 virus — the virus almost similar to SARS-CoV-2 except for the ability of infect humans, the Chinese at Shi Zhengli’s lab worked on it between 2016–19 — until the viral outbreak in Wuhan. It’s natural to be curious how SARS-CoV-2 outbreak occured in the city at the same time when they were working on the closest known relative of that virus.
Through the years, a US-based non-profit named EcoHealth Alliance, run by Peter Daszak, received millions in US federal grants that were then distributed in smaller sub-grants to institues, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to fund and collaborate on gain of function research.
It boils down to this: An institute funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus in the same city as that lab. It is not being intellectually honest not to consider the hypothesis of a lab escape, according to a former US health official quoted by Katherine Eban in her Vanity Fair investigation.
Citing insider accounts from the US State Department, Katherine reported that officials studying the Wuhan Institute of Virology learnt three of their researchers conducting gain of function experiments on coronavirus samples fell ill in the autumn of 2019 — before the COVID-19 outbreak was known.
Katherine reported that, as part of the State Department investigation, US virologists highligted that 11 of 23 Chinese authors of a study published in April 2020 worked for China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences — the Chinese army’s medical research institute. In the study, they engineered mice with humanised lungs to study their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. The US investigators concluded the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019 — before the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Katherine wrote, “The US National Security Council officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanised mouse models to see which might be infectious to humans?”
Following the publication of the US intelligence community’s report’s summary, Katherine noted the lab-theory was not outright rejected and this consolidates its credibility. Moreover, she higlighted natural and lab origins are not mutually exclusive — the SARS-CoV-2 strain could have come from a bat sample collected in a cave, which could in turn have infected a field or laboratory worker.
The next step: US Congress bipartisan investigation
Since US-based scientists, from Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance who funnelled chestfulls of US government funds to Wuhan researchers, to Ralph Baric, who hotwired coronaviruses for years with the Chinese Bat Woman, are almost as deep into gain of function research as the Chinese — if not more, it’s natural a US investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 would have to look within their borders as well.
The US Republicans have called for a bipartisan Congressional investigation, but they are opposed by Democrats who control both the houses of the US Congress. Without Democrats’ support, any partisan investigation will lack Congressional subpoena powers.
“Congress has a duty to conduct its own bipartisan investigation into the origins of the pandemic, armed with subpoena power to untangle the web connecting US government funding to organisations like the EcoHealth Alliance to scientific journals like Lancet and Springer-Nature,” said Congressperson Mike Gallagher in a statement, a China expert and a former military intelligence officer.
Whether the Biden administration would release a more detailed report or the Democrats would join the Republicans’ call for a bipartisan investigation remains to be seen but what’s known is this — the Chinese were indeed engineering coronaviruses with active US financial and intellectual resources and the intelligence agencies missed the chain of evidence that’s in public domain in its entirety. Open-source investigators of DRASTIC and investigative writers and journalists outdid the US intelligence community.
Madhur Sharma is an Indian journalist. Connect on Twitter at @madhur_mrt.
Graphics in the blogpost belong to the author and may not be used anywhere. They have been made on Canva.
