Freshly declassified U.S. government intelligence about the origins of the covid-19 pandemic reveals some new insights into China’s virus research but no additional clarity about how the global outbreak began and is unlikely to settle that debate, which has exacerbated tensions between Washington and Beijing and fueled a heated dispute among scientists, lawmakers and government officials.
For more than three years, investigations about the virus’s origins have centered on a pair of dueling hypotheses: a natural spillover from infected animals to humans, and the “lab leak” theory. The latter posits that the virus made its way out of a laboratory where researchers were studying coronaviruses — likely in Wuhan, China, the site of the first cases of an unusual, highly transmissible respiratory illness reported in December 2019.
In May 2021, President Biden instructed U.S. intelligence agencies to examine the virus’s origins, based partly on their own classified sources of information, including about the Chinese government’s response to the outbreak. Intelligence officials previously reported that the agencies did not reach consensus, though most of them tended to favor the natural origins scenario.
The new report, which was required by law and released Friday evening, adds little to those earlier assessments, which remain unchanged, but it addresses some specific potential links that lab leak proponents have raised.
The report mainly focuses on potential connections between the pandemic and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including collaborations between researchers at the civilian institute and the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military. The WIV was conducting extensive research on coronaviruses.
The intelligence agencies found that “some of the research conducted by the PLA and the WIV included work with several viruses, including coronaviruses, but no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2,” the virus that causes covid-19, according to the report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
While acknowledging the research conducted at the lab, including on animal sampling and genetic analysis, “We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic,” the intelligence report found.
Some media reports and Republican-led probes have suggested that there was a biosafety incident at the Wuhan lab in 2019, citing translations of Chinese Communist Party official statements and training sessions for lab workers.
But while the U.S. intelligence assessment acknowledges that some lab workers “probably did not use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time” before the pandemic, U.S. officials say they were unable to draw a link between those practices and the emergence of covid-19.
“We do not know of a specific biosafety incident at the WIV that spurred the pandemic and the WIV’s biosafety training appears routine, rather than an emergency response by China’s leadership,” the ODNI report says.
Despite warnings from other Chinese scientists, Wuhan researchers for years experimented with coronaviruses in laboratories that lacked proper safety equipment for dealing with pathogens known for their ability to “directly infect humans through their spike protein,” the report says. In addition, a safety inspection in early 2020 found problems with aging equipment as well as inadequate disinfectants and ventilation gear, it said.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Scientists in early 2020 generally dismissed the possibility of a lab leak, arguing instead that the virus probably spilled over from animals to humans.
“We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” five prominent virologists wrote in Nature Medicine in March 2020. That article — titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” — helped influence subsequent news coverage of the pandemic and was later touted by U.S. officials when questioned about the virus’ origins.
Other researchers have also concluded that the pandemic may have begun at a Wuhan market near where the first cases of an unusual pneumonia were reported. But those assertions have failed to quell the rancorous debate over the virus’s origins, and some scientists say that recent efforts to proclaim that the market is the clear starting point of the pandemic — including recent analysis suggesting that raccoon dogs kept at the Wuhan market may be linked to the first covid cases — needed further scrutiny and ultimately backfired.
Several of the authors behind the “proximal origins” paper have since suggested that their earlier conclusion about no plausible lab origin of covid-19 may have been too strident.
Congressional Republicans have also opened probes into whether the U.S. government inadvertently contributed to the pandemic by funding coronavirus research in China, and whether scientists wrongly coordinated with federal officials such as Anthony S. Fauci to shape their conclusions about the virus’s origins.
Fauci declined to comment.
The House panel probing the covid response on Friday subpoenaed Kristian Andersen, a Scripps Research scientist and one of the authors of the proximal origins article, requesting additional documents.
“Dr. Kristian Andersen played a pivotal role in potentially suppressing the lab leak hypothesis, and Americans deserve to know why this happened, who was involved, and how we can prevent the intentional suppression of scientific discourse during a future pandemic,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chairs the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, said in a statement.
Scripps Research did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Democrats have criticized Republicans for their focus on the virus’ origins, saying that their probes have become too focused on partisan politics and not enough on public health.
“Rather than leveraging the question of the pandemic’s origins to advance a politically-driven narrative, we should — to the best of our ability — comprehensively, rigorously, and objectively consider all potential possibilities of how the virus emerged so that our findings can inform good policies to prevent and better prepare us for the next pandemic,” Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), the covid panel’s top Democrat, wrote in a June 8 letter to Wenstrup that was shared with The Washington Post.
Supporters of the lab leak theory point to what they consider circumstantial but compelling evidence.
Wuhan happens to be a leading research hub for coronaviruses, they note. In the years leading up to the covid-19 outbreak, Wuhan scientists collected, analyzed and tested thousands of unknown coronaviruses, many of them extracted from bats that are native to China’s far southern provinces. At the time of the outbreak, Chinese scientists also acknowledged widespread safety problems in the country’s laboratories, lapses that could, in theory, lead to accidental exposures to dangerous viruses.
“The lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence and common sense,” John Ratcliffe, who served as the director of national intelligence in the Trump administration and was privy to classified information about the virus, said in a statement. “By contrast, after four years, there is still nothing which links this virus to anything in nature — no environmental source, no intermediary host or animal species.”
“The Biden Administration’s continued obfuscation of COVID origins is a disservice to the intelligence community, placates the Chinese Communist Party, and denies justice to millions of Americans who lost loved ones to this deadly virus,” Ratcliffe said.
There is no public evidence of a lab leak, and no record that any of Wuhan’s laboratories possessed the SARS-CoV-2 strain that causes covid-19, although Chinese officials have never released an inventory listing the coronaviruses that were being studied in late 2019. The intelligence assessment also concludes that the Wuhan lab “first possessed SARS-CoV-2 in late December 2019, when WIV researchers isolated and identified the virus from samples from patients diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown causes.”
Beijing likewise has declined to release detailed records about three Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists who reportedly fell ill with flu-like symptoms in November 2019. News reports in recent weeks have questioned whether the scientists — including one of China’s top coronavirus specialists — might have been the outbreak’s “Patient Zero.”
The scientists strongly rejected the reports, saying that they did not contract covid-19, and never worked with live viruses in the lab. The denials were first reported by the journal Science.
U.S. officials also said they could not find a connection between the ill researchers and a lab leak, adding that some of the sick researchers were confirmed to have other illnesses. “We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19,” the intelligence report concludes.