We may never know where COVID came from
Not as long as the Chinese Communist Party is in power, at least.
The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.
The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.
To be fair to the Lancet open-letter writers, it doesn’t say anything about whether or not COVID-19 escaped from a lab, but pushes back against conspiracy theories about whether it was somehow concocted in a lab:
We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2),1 and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens. This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent.
Low my opinion of the Chinese Communist Party may be, but I am extremely skeptical of theories that this is some kind of biological weapon deliberately unleashed on the world. There’s no contradiction between believing COVID-19 emerged in nature and that someone studying it at the lab messed up and let it escape.
This is the part I have a problem with:
We have watched as the scientists, public health professionals, and medical professionals of China, in particular, have worked diligently and effectively to rapidly identify the pathogen behind this outbreak, put in place significant measures to reduce its impact, and share their results transparently with the global health community. This effort has been remarkable.
I have no doubt many of China’s doctors and scientists behaved heroically. And I have even less doubt that their superiors have been engaged in a blatant cover-up since the fall of 2019.
Here’s some of that remarkable transparency in action:
The World Health Organization (WHO)'s investigation into the origins of COVID-19 has stalled due to ongoing difficulties in collaborating with China.
The theory that COVID-19 was leaked from a lab hasn't gone away, with the last WHO investigation calling for further investigation into the theory, given that there was no new data on which to evaluate the allegations. The man who helped lead the U.S. response to COVID-19, Anthony Fauci, said in November that he had a "completely open mind" about the origins of the virus.
The scientific advisory group tasked with investigating evidence around the origins of the coronavirus had called in June 2022 for new studies, including audits of labs close to where the original outbreak was first reported in Wuhan, China. On Tuesday, the journal Nature reported that the second phase of the investigation had been shelved, quoting the WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, Maria Van Kerkhove, as saying “there is no phase two.”
However, a WHO spokesperson told POLITICO that the investigation had not been abandoned, but needs access and data from China for knowledge to advance.
“We have repeatedly and publicly said that the origin needs investigating and China must provide access and info for this to happen — and if this doesn’t happen, efforts to understand the origins will remain rather stymied,” said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević.
Keep in mind that authoritarian governments sometimes act like this because there’s something they really, really don’t want the world to know - and, at other times, they act like this because f**k you, that’s why.
That WSJ story acknowledges that the Department of Energy has “low confidence” in its assessment. Vice explains what that means:
The U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) uses the terms “low,” “moderate,” and “high” confidence to describe the amount and quality of the information behind any one of its claims. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the body that brings the 18 IC agencies together and coordinates them, “A low confidence level generally indicates that the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information, or that the IC has significant concerns or problems with the information sources.” That definition can be found in the ODNI’s 2011 guide on the IC and how to properly understand what an intelligence report means.
ODNI’s definition was not included in the coverage of the Wall Street Journal, which first broke news of the Department of Energy’s intelligence assessment. Nor was an explanation of what low confidence actually means, which would have been especially important when the vast majority of the article’s readers were presumably not intelligence professionals trained in how to interpret the very particular ways an intelligence report is written.
In other words, the Department of Energy came to its assessment of the lab leak theory with information that is incomplete and questionable, and from which solid conclusions can not be drawn. This is compared to “high confidence,” where agencies are able to make a “solid judgment,” according to the ODNI document.
[…]
Arguably the most interesting part of the intelligence report is that the FBI holds “moderate confidence” in the lab leak theory. As the Wall Street Journal said in its report, the FBI has declined to elaborate on what underlying intelligence it may have to support this moderate confidence level.
The Department of Energy maintains scientific expertise, something which the Wall Street Journal notes and which, presumably, can contribute to its intelligence assessment.
None of this reflects a flaw in the system. It’s important for intelligence reports of this sort to include minority and dissenting views and to offer transparency as to how they’re arrived at, because their purpose in the end is to inform policymakers, who need to be aware of different viewpoints and of how solid the evidentiary basis for them is. Ultimately, the main takeaway from the classified report is that we don’t have enough solid underlying information yet to know how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Four agencies continue to assess with “low confidence” that natural transmission from animals to humans was the reason.
In other words, the lab-leak theory has not been proven. Not even close.
But the theory is plausible. It was always plausible. Had COVID-19 emerged just down the street from the CDC in Atlanta, no one would dismiss you as a wingnut or a racist for suggesting there might be a connection.
Then again, had it happened in Atlanta or in some other place not ruled by a one-party dictatorship, we’d likely have a lot more data to work with. Unless and until the CCP gets the Ceausescu treatment, we’re all just guessing.