US intelligence agencies say they may never be able to identify the origins of Covid-19, as they released a new, more detailed version of their review of whether the coronavirus came from animal-to-human transmission or leaked from a lab.
File photo. Photo: 123rf.com
The Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in a declassified report that a natural origin and a lab leak are both plausible hypotheses for how SARS-COV-2 first infected humans. But it said analysts disagree on which is more likely or whether any definitive assessment can be made at all.
The report also dismissed suggestions that the coronavirus originated as a bioweapon, saying proponents of this theory "do not have direct access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology" and have been accused of spreading disinformation.
The report issued on Friday is an update of a 90-day review that President Joe Biden's administration released in August, amid intense political infighting over how much to blame China for the effects of the global pandemic rather than governments that may not have moved quickly enough to protect citizens.
China responded on Friday by criticising the report.
"The US moves of relying on its intelligence apparatus instead of scientists to trace the origins of Covid-19 is a complete political farce," Liu Pengyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in an emailed statement.
"... It will only undermine science-based origins study and hinder the global effort of finding the source of the virus," the statement said.
Former Republican President Donald Trump - who lost his bid for re-election as the deadly pandemic ravaged the US economy - and many of his supporters referred to Covid-19 as the "China virus."
Some US spy agencies had strongly favored the explanation that the virus originated in nature. But there has been little corroboration and over recent months the virus has spread widely and naturally among wild animals.
The ODNI report said four US spy agencies and a multi-agency body have "low confidence" that Covid-19 originated with an infected animal or a related virus.
But one agency said it had "moderate confidence" that the first human Covid-19 infection most likely was the result of a laboratory accident, probably involving experimentation or animal handling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
US spy agencies believe they will not be able to produce a more definitive explanation for the origin of Covid-19 without new information demonstrating that the virus took a specific pathway from animals to humans or that a Wuhan laboratory was handling the virus or a related virus before Covid-19 surfaced.
The report said US agencies and the global scientific community lacked "clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest Covid-19 cases" and said it could revisit this inconclusive finding if more evidence surfaces.
China has faced international criticism for failing to cooperate more fully in investigations of Covid's origins.
The embassy statement also dismissed that criticism.
"We have been supporting science-based efforts on origins tracing, and will continue to stay actively engaged. That said, we firmly oppose attempts to politicise this issue," it said.
- Reuters
US intel doesn’t expect to determine origins of COVID-19
By NOMAAN MERCHANT
FILe - Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines introduces President Joe Biden during a visit to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in McLean, Va., on July 27, 2021. U.S. intelligence agencies say they likely won't ever be able to conclude whether COVID-19 spread by animal-to-human transmission or leaked from a lab. The Director of National Intelligence issued a paper Friday, Oct. 29, that elaborates on findings released in August of a 90-day review ordered by Biden. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Barring an unforeseen breakthrough, intelligence agencies won’t be able to conclude whether COVID-19 spread by animal-to-human transmission or leaked from a lab, officials said Friday in releasing a fuller version of their review into the origins of the pandemic.
The paper issued by the Director of National Intelligence elaborates on findings released in August of a 90-day review ordered by President Joe Biden. That review said that U.S. intelligence agencies were divided on the origins of the virus but that analysts do not believe the virus was developed as a bioweapon and that most agencies believe the virus was not genetically engineered.
China has resisted global pressure to cooperate fully with investigations into the pandemic or provide access to genetic sequences of coronaviruses kept at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which remains a subject of speculation for its research and reported safety problems. Biden launched the review amid growing momentum for the theory — initially broadly dismissed by experts — that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab. Former President Donald Trump and his supporters long argued that a lab leak was possible as they sought to deflect criticism of his handling of the pandemic.
China remains an exceedingly difficult place for intelligence operations and has fought back against allegations that it mishandled the emergence of the pandemic, which has killed 5 million people worldwide. Senior officials involved in the full report’s drafting said they hoped it would better inform the public about the challenges of determining the virus’s origins.
“We don’t think we’re one or two reports away from being able to understand it,” said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
The full report notes that the Wuhan Institute of Virology “previously created chimeras, or combinations, of SARS-like coronaviruses, but this information does not provide insight into whether SARS Cov-2 was genetically engineered by the WIV.”
Information that lab researchers sought medical treatment for a respiratory illness in November 2019 “is not diagnostic of the pandemic’s origins,” the report said.
And allegations that China launched the virus as a bioweapon were dismissed because their proponents “do not have direct access to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” are making scientifically invalid claims or are accused of spreading disinformation, the report said
Four agencies within the intelligence community said with low confidence that the virus was initially transmitted from an animal to a human. A fifth intelligence agency believed with moderate confidence that the first human infection was linked to a lab.
Prior to writing the report, analysts conducted what the report describes as a “Team A/Team B” debate to try to strengthen or weaken each hypothesis.
The report identifies types of data that investigators still want China to provide access to, including records and tissue samples from several markets in Wuhan, including the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, Qiyimen Live Animal Market, Dijiao Outdoor Pet Market and others. Scientists originally believed the virus emerged from animals sold at the Huanan market, which has since been ruled out by some as the origin site.
Confirming with 100% certainty the origin of a virus is often not fast, easy or always even possible.
In the case of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS — a disease caused by a beta coronavirus, like the current coronavirus — researchers first identified the virus in February 2003. Later that year, scientists discovered the likely intermediary hosts: Himalayan palm civets found at live-animal markets in Guangdong, China. But it wasn’t until 2017 that researchers traced the likely original source of the virus to bat caves in China’s Yunnan province.
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Associated Press writer Christina Larson in Washington contributed to this report.
Report: Intelligence community divided on whether COVID originated naturally or from
lab leak
An unclassified version of an intelligence community assessment on the origins of COVID-19 released Friday afternoon shows that various agencies still don’t agree on whether the pandemic began from a laboratory incident in Wuhan, China, or was caused by a natural crossover from animals to humans.
In the spring, President Biden ordered the intelligence community to conduct a 90-day review looking at the pandemic’s origins in China, amid growing debate and questions on the issue. The virus has now killed some 5 million people around the world, and infected almost a quarter of a billion, while disrupting global economies.
“After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19,” states the report, released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”
The report, however, appears to discount the idea that the virus was engineered in a laboratory as a weapon. “Most IC analysts assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered,” the report states.
The intelligence community also appears largely skeptical that the virus, even if it did escape from a lab, was the result of what is known as “gain-of-function” research, in which scientists boost a virus’s capabilities in order to study its behavior. Yet even on this point, analysts at the various agencies appear uncertain.
“No IC analysts assess that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of laboratory adaptation, although some analysts do not have enough information to make this determination,” the report states.
In recent months, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Biden’s top scientific adviser on the coronavirus, has faced Republican criticism about the funding provided to the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he heads. The claim made by Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky is that NIH helped enable gain-of-function research that could have started the pandemic. Fauci has argued that the work the lab conducted with those funds did not meet the criteria for gain-of-function research.
While noting the lack of consensus among intelligence experts, the report is also likely to give new life to those who have long argued that a laboratory leak of the coronavirus should be considered as a possibility. That theory, once dismissed by some as fringe, appears to have some strong support among one unidentified part of the intelligence community.
“One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident,” the report reads, “probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Yahoo News first reported in April 2020 that the intelligence community was looking at the possibility that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
The U.S. intelligence community analysts employ what’s known as “confidence assessments” to convey to policymakers and others within the national security bureaucracy how assured they are of their conclusions.
“High confidence” judgments are generally taken to be based on high-quality information or intelligence. “Moderate confidence” judgments “mean that the information is credibly sourced and plausible,” but not of high enough quality to warrant a high confidence judgement, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Finally, “low confidence” judgments are based on evidence that is “questionable,” “too fragmented or poorly corroborated,” according to the office.
The carefully couched language of the intelligence community is likely to settle few debates. And those who were hoping to have a more definitive statement on the virus’s origins are likely to be disappointed by the report, particularly since the intelligence community says it “will be unable to provide a more definitive explanation for the origin of COVID-19 unless new information” comes to light.
President Biden ordered US intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of COVID-19 in May.
The Director of National Intelligence released a report about the investigation's findings on Friday.
It said the theories that the coronavirus accidentally leaked from a lab or jumped to people from animals both remain "plausible."
A declassified US intelligence report on the coronavirus' origin found that both the natural transmission and lab leak theories remain "plausible."
The report, released by the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, details the findings from an investigation that President Joe Biden ordered in May.
"All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident," the report said.
Although the report did not favor one theory over the other, it did come to several other important conclusions. First, most of the authors said the coronavirus wasn't genetically engineered, nor developed as a bioweapon. Second, the analysts think Chinese officials were unaware of the virus' spread before the first cluster of COVID-19 cases were reported in Wuhan in December 2019.
Evidence for a lab accident
The report suggested, with moderate confidence, that the first human infection could have been the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or virus sampling at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Proponents of the lab-leak theory often focus on that institute, since it's a high-level biosafety lab where scientists studied coronaviruses before the pandemic. Eighteen scientists published a letter in May saying they thought the lab-leak theory remained viable.
The analysts behind the new government report wrote that they consider biosafety conditions at the institute to be "inadequate." That makes the possibility of an accident more likely, especially given that research associated with the institute had involved handling animals that could be coronavirus carriers.
However, Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, has worked directly with WIV researchers and previously told Insider an accident there would be "highly unlikely."
Mazet added that she and the WIV staff developed and implemented a "very stringent safety protocol."
The new report suggests that if the virus did emerge from a lab, the leak was accidental. Chinese scientists "probably were unaware in the initial months that such an incident had occurred," the report says.
Virologists at the institute were among the first to start studying the new coronavirus, and publicly shared its genetic code in early January. Such activities, the analysts add, "are a strong indicator that the WIV lacked foreknowledge of the virus."
Proponents of the lab-accident theory also often point to a report found by The Wall Street Journal that revealed three WIV staff members got sick and went to a hospital more than a month before experts identified the first COVID-19 cases in Wuhan. The report said the workers' symptoms were "consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."
But the new report says that's insufficient evidence: "Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of COVID-19 infection," it says.
Not a bioweapon
The reason the analysts behind the report don't think the coronavirus was purposefully engineered is that its genetic code has no tell-tale hallmarks of manipulation.
A March 2020 study analyzed the virus' DNA and concluded that it "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus." And investigators from the World Health Organization found no evidence the WIV stored virus samples prior to the pandemic that, when combined, could have produced the new coronavirus.
The report also concluded that the virus is not a biological weapon, saying that theory is only "supported by scientifically invalid claims" from people who are "suspected of spreading disinformation."
Did the virus jump from bats?
The WHO investigators who traveled to Wuhan could not rule out a lab leak, either. But they concluded that the coronavirus most likely spilled over to people from animals - possibly at wildlife farms in southern China.
The new report, similarly, says that a lab leak is "less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants, and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals."
That kind of spillover has been the leading theory throughout the pandemic, primarily because 75% of new infectious diseases come to us from animals. Plus, the coronavirus' genetic code is very similar to that of other coronaviruses found in bats.
Still, the WHO team examined 80,000 animals from 31 provinces across China and didn't find a single case of this coronavirus. China shut down the wildlife farms in question in February 2020, though, and researchers weren't given access to samples from them.
China's cooperation is needed
The authors of the new report said they can't determine the coronavirus' origin unless they get more information from China, which would require the country to be more cooperative and transparent than it has been.
Even the WHO investigators weren't given full access to the WIV's files, databases, freezer inventories, records, or safety logs. That led Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, to say he did "not believe that this assessment was extensive enough."
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