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People walk past a COVID testing site on May 17, 2022, in New York City. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Since the first cases of a mysterious new respiratory illness were recorded in China in late 2019, scientists have come to know the pathogen named SARS-CoV-2 (along with its Greek-letter variants) with an uncommon intimacy. With astonishing speed, they decoded its genetic architecture and, using that knowledge, created treatments and vaccines that have reduced the pandemic to a background concern in many parts of the world.
Yet more than three years after the advent of the coronavirus, the most fundamental question remains: Just where did it come from?
At first, investigators pointed to Chinas trade in exotic animals. A wildlife market in Wuhan, a city in Hubei province, emerged as the potential site of the original transmission. And a little-known creature, the pangolin, was widely suspected as having served as the unwitting vehicle of zoonosis, or animal-to-human transfer of the coronavirus.
People wearing face masks buy lotus roots at a wet market, following an outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, on Feb. 8, 2021. (Aly Song/Reuters)
But a faction of investigators has insistently maintained that the virus spilled out from a laboratory such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, perhaps as the result of an accident. While their argument was at first dismissed as conspiratorial and xenophobic, it gained currency throughout 2021 and 2022, especially as genetic data seemed to point circumstantially, but persuasively to evidence of human engineering.
Today, the scientific community generally remains behind the zoonotic hypothesis: that is, that the virus jumped from animals to humans at the wildlife market, or at some other point of contact between species.
Yet evidence for the lab leak narrative is only building.
On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the federal Department of Energy whose ranks include highly trained biologists has revised its estimate to reflect growing (if still tenuous) confidence that the virus emerged from a Chinese laboratory. Other agencies disagree with that assessment; the development seemed only to underscore how contentious the question of how the pandemic began remains.
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The Department of Energy was one of several agencies asked by the Biden administration to assess whether the coronavirus originated at a wildlife market or as a result of a laboratory accident.
John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications at the National Security Council, answers questions during the daily press briefing at the White House on Monday. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
During a White House briefing on Monday, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that the Biden administration was determined to discover how the pandemic began. We really do want to know what happened here, Kirby told reporters.
The news added to a growing frustration with Beijing, which has allowed little legitimate inquiry into how the pandemic began.
Chinas government may accuse others of politicizing #COVID19, diplomat and Asia expert Jamie Metzl wrote on Twitter, but by destroying samples, hiding evidence, gagging Chinese scientists and undermining international efforts, Beijing has made a full origins investigation impossible and put the world at risk."
Vendors sell fish in an open market on Dec. 2, 2020, in Wuhan. (Getty Images)
It is not entirely clear what led the Energy Department to revise its estimate; the update delivered recently to members of the Biden administration and congressional leaders says agency investigators now have low confidence in a lab leak origin for COVID-19.
For intelligence analysts, a low-confidence assessment is one based on highly incomplete evidence. Still, the shift indicates that evidence could be shifting in favor of a lab leak.
An intelligence official told the Journal that the Department of Energy revisions were based on what Saturdays report described as new intelligence, further study of academic literature and consultation with experts outside government.
Four other agencies have expressed low confidence in a zoonotic origin, meaning that they believe the coronavirus came from a wildlife market but lack the evidence to make a more definitive declaration. According to the New York Times, those agencies reviewed the new evidence provided by the Department of Energy but chose to stay with their original assessment.
In other words, disagreement remains.
There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how COVID started, Kirby acknowledged on Monday.
Peter Daszak of the World Health Organization team salutes toward Chinese staffers as he prepares to leave for the airport at the end of a WHO mission in Wuhan on Feb. 10, 2021. (Ng Han Guan/AP)
Last month, the inspector general of the federal Health and Human Services Department faulted the National Institutes of Health for not conducting sufficient oversight of subgrants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology that had been made over the course of several years through an American intermediary, the EcoHealth Alliance.
Proponents of the lab leak hypothesis believe that understanding the role of EcoHealth Alliance is critical to unraveling the mystery of the pandemics origins. The New York-based nonprofit has maintained that it funded mainstream research that helped global health efforts, but the inspector general's report found that there was little monitoring of the work Chinese researchers were doing with U.S. funds.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning gestures during a news conference in Beijing on Feb. 3. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)
Chinas Foreign Ministry forcefully rejected the Journals reporting. The origins-tracing of SARS-CoV-2 is about science and should not be politicized. China has always supported and participated in global science-based origins-tracing, spokeswoman Mao Ning said during a Monday press briefing.
Mao pointed to a World Health Organization (WHO) report that endorsed the zoonotic hypothesis.
Certain parties should stop rehashing the lab leak narrative, stop smearing China and stop politicizing origins-tracing, she said.
An aerial view shows the P4 laboratory (center) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology on April 17, 2020. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Not at all. In early 2021, a group of researchers conducted an investigatory visit to Wuhan, in what remains the only instance of Western observers being allowed to conduct field work regarding coronavirus origins.
The ensuing report did conclude that the virus most likely originated in a wildlife market. It rated the possibility of a lab leak as extremely unlikely.
Critics said WHO did not press China with sufficient intensity; the critics also pointed to China-friendly investigators (including EcoHealth alliance president Peter Daszak) on the WHO team that traveled to Wuhan. Eventually, even the head of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, cautioned against ruling out the possibility of a laboratory accident, thus seemingly contradicting the report his own agency had produced.
Earlier this month, WHO disputed reports that it was unable to further investigate the pandemics origins because of Beijings intransigence. The episode only underscored how little clarity investigators have managed to achieve and how Beijings stonewalling continues to frustrate attempts at a legitimate investigation.
President Biden speaks to members of the media before boarding Marine One on Feb. 24. (Will Oliver/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
President Biden has vowed to compete with China on the world stage but to avoid outright conflict. The persistent questions over how the coronavirus began have frustrated that nuanced approach, forcing the president to confront an issue that will be difficult for him, or any Western leader, to resolve.
In May 2021, Biden asked the intelligence community to assess how the coronavirus began, in a signal that his administration was willing to entertain what had been, during Donald Trumps presidency, a matter of conspiratorial musing. (The Department of Energy revisions stemmed from the 2021 directive.)
At the same time, Biden has been careful not to confront Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the matter. With China potentially preparing to help Russia in its invasion of Ukraine and, in the longer term, possibly preparing for an invasion of Taiwan, Biden has to carefully choose where to press Xi, and how forcefully to do so.
The recent brouhaha over a Chinese surveillance balloon that flew over the United States before being shot down by the U.S. military only deepened the tensions between Washington and Beijing.
That leaves the Republican-led House of Representatives as the most likely source of an aggressive investigation into the lab leak hypothesis. GOP leaders vowed to undertake an extensive inquest into how the pandemic began after winning back the lower chamber in last falls congressional midterms.
But those efforts have been hampered by far-right figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who have proffered baseless conspiracy theories about the pandemic, including outlandish accusations that the coronavirus was a bioweapon manufactured with the complicity of American officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the renowned immunologist and former White House adviser.
More-mainstream Republicans are trying to hold China to account without embracing conspiracies and demonstrable falsehoods.
Evidence has been piling up for over a year in favor of the lab leak hypothesis. I am glad some of our agencies are starting to listen to common sense and change their assessment, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., told the New York Times.
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We want to know what led to this, so we can hopefully try and prevent something similar from happening in the future.
Those words, from Dr. David Relman, an infectious disease expert and microbiologist at Stanford University, reflected the national conversation around the origins of Covid-19 in 2021.
Did it come from a lab? Was it a zoonotic transfer? Something else? Surely, with time, an answer would become clear.
But now, three years removed from the start of a pandemic that is still disrupting daily life, an assessment from the US Energy Department is only adding to the confusion about what really happened in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
The department has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Yet two sources said that the department assessed in the intelligence report that it had low confidence that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, CNNs Jeremy Herb and Natasha Bertrand reported.
Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence; and a low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan acknowledged on CNNs State of the Union on Sunday that the intelligence community is divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.
The intelligence community has been split on the matter for years.
For the better part of 2020, advocates of the lab leak theory had to fight against claims they were being xenophobic or racist in part thanks to anti-Chinese rhetoric from then-President Donald Trump, who embraced the theory.
An inquiry launched by Trumps State Department, which sought to investigate whether Chinas biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemics origin in Wuhan, was shut down early on in the Biden administration.
A letter from public health experts published in February 2020 in The Lancet, an influential scientific journal, also set the tone early by declaring the virus to have a natural origin.
But the lab leak theory has gained more traction with time, especially following reports that the intelligence community found evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill with a mysterious virus in November 2019 although its not clear whether they contracted Covid-19 and no further evidence has emerged to corroborate that report.
By July 2021, senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins believed that the lab leak theory was at least as credible as the possibility that the virus emerged naturally in the wild a dramatic shift from a year earlier, when Democrats publicly downplayed such an idea.
The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing for further investigation into the theory, while accusing the Biden administration of playing down its possibility.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul said Sunday he was pleased the Energy Department has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to. (The Texas Republican had released a 2021 report that concluded that the preponderance of the evidence showed the pandemic originated with a leak from the Wuhan lab.)
Now is the time for the entire Biden administration to join the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the majority of Americans by publicly concluding what common sense told us at the start the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, McCaul said in a statement.
Sullivan said Sunday that Biden had directed the national laboratories, which are part of the Department of Energy, to be brought into the assessment.
Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question, Sullivan told CNNs Dana Bash.
Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just dont have enough information to be sure.
So where does that leave us? Not far from where we started.
Past pandemics have emerged from natural transmission through animals, and it often takes months or years to discover the host that the virus passed through as it adapted to infect humans.
In some cases, as in Ebola, the original natural source has never been identified. And its been more than 40 years since the first cases of Ebola.
So why does it matter where Covid-19 came from? As Relman, the Stanford microbiologist, previously noted to CNN, finding the answer can help prevent the next pandemic.
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WASHINGTON New intelligence has prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic, though U.S. spy agencies remain divided over the origins of the virus, American officials said on Sunday.
The conclusion was a change from the departments earlier position that it was undecided on how the virus emerged.
Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Departments conclusion was made with low confidence, suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.
Officials would not disclose what the intelligence was. But many of the Energy Departments insights come from its network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy networks or communications intercepts.
Intelligence officials believe the scrutiny of the pandemics beginnings could be important to improving global response to future health crises, though they caution that finding an answer about the source of the virus may be difficult or even impossible given Chinese opposition to further research. Scientists say there is a responsibility to explain how a pandemic that has killed almost seven million people started, and learning more about its origins could help researchers understand what poses the biggest threats of future outbreaks.
The new intelligence and the shift in the departments view was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, declined to confirm the intelligence. But he said President Biden had ordered that the national labs be brought into the effort to determine the origins of the outbreak so that the government was using every tool it had.
In addition to the Energy Department, the F.B.I. has also concluded, with moderate confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses. Four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, with low confidence, that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission, the director of national intelligences office announced in October 2021.
Mr. Sullivan said those divisions remain.
There is a variety of views in the intelligence community, he said on CNNs State of the Union on Sunday. Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just dont have enough information to be sure.
Mr. Sullivan said if more information was learned, the administration would report it to Congress and the public. But right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question, he said.
Some scientists believe that the current evidence, including virus genes, points to a large food and live animal market in Wuhan as the most likely place the coronavirus emerged.
How Times reporters cover politics.We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
Leaders of the intelligence community are set to brief Congress on March 8 and 9 as part of annual hearings on global threats. Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, and other senior officials would most likely be asked about the continuing inquiry into the viruss origins.
How the pandemic began has become a divisive line of intelligence reporting, and recent congressional reports have not been bipartisan.
Many Democrats have not been persuaded by the lab leak hypothesis, with some saying they believe the natural causes explanation and others saying they are not certain that enough intelligence will emerge to draw a conclusion.
But many Republicans on Capitol Hill have said they believe the virus could have come from one of Chinas research labs in Wuhan. A congressional subcommittee, created when Republicans took over the House in January, has made examining the lab leak theory a central focus of its work. It is expected to convene the first of a series of hearings in March.
Evidence has been piling up for over a year in favor of the lab leak hypothesis, said Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and leads a new House committee on China. I am glad some of our agencies are starting to listen to common sense and change their assessment.
On Tuesday, Mr. Gallagher will hold the new committees first hearing, looking at the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the United States. Future hearings, Mr. Gallagher said, will look at biosecurity and Chinas efforts to influence international organizations like the World Health Organization.
Where our committee can have a role is teasing out what this communicates about the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party, an organization that was willing to cover up the origins of the pandemic and thereby cost us critical days, months and weeks and millions of lives in the process, Mr. Gallagher said in an interview on Sunday.
Chinese officials have repeatedly called the lab leak hypothesis a lie that has no basis in science and is politically motivated.
Early in the Biden administration, the president ordered the intelligence agencies to investigate the pandemics origins, after criticism of a W.H.O. report on the matter. While there was material that had not been thoroughly examined by intelligence officials, the review ultimately did not yield any new consensus inside the agencies.
The March 2021 report by the W.H.O. said it was extremely unlikely that the virus emerged accidentally from a lab. But China appointed half the scientists who wrote the report and exerted major control over it. American officials have been largely dismissive of that work.
The intelligence agencies have said they do not believe there is any evidence that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was created deliberately as a biological weapon. But they have said that whether it emerged naturally, perhaps from a market in Wuhan, or escaped accidentally from a lab is the subject of legitimate debate.
Anthony Ruggiero, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former National Security Council staff member focusing on biodefense issues during the Trump administration, said he believed China is still hiding crucial information about how the virus emerged. He said the lab leak theory should not be dismissed.
The lab leak origin for the Covid-19 pandemic is not, and was not, a conspiracy theory, he said.
Benjamin Mueller and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
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