How did the pandemic really start?
COVID Conundrum
Thus far, there have been 169,420,894 COVID-19 cases and 3,519,085 deaths (including 600,000 Americans) affecting 220 countries worldwide. Still, nearly 18 months later, there is a lack of agreement as to how it started.
Reuters reported that the U.S. intelligence community’s agencies had two theories on where COVID-19 began. Two agencies believed that it emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals. A third agency believed that a laboratory accident was the source of the global pandemic. The intelligence community did not identify which two of the 17 agencies constituting the U.S. intelligence community thought that the virus had originated with infected animals and which agency that that it originated with a laboratory accident. In both cases, the agencies believe the evidence supporting their view is far from conclusive.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said, "The U.S. Intelligence Community does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus was transmitted initially but has coalesced around two likely scenarios. There is not sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other."
The New York Times reported that the Biden administration has ordered an intelligence inquiry into the origins of the virus. The order was issued as health officials and scientists have renewed calls for a more rigorous examination. President Biden, who wants the report in 90 days, indicated that his administration thinks that there is a possibility that the deadly virus was accidentally leaked from a lab, as well as a possibility of the prevailing theory that it was transmitted by an animal to humans outside a lab.
President Biden said, “I have now asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.”
Top health officials have appealed for a more rigorous inquiry. An international team of experts convened by the World Health Organization largely dismissed the possibility that the virus had accidentally escaped from a Chinese laboratory called the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Many scientists still think that a “natural spillover from animal to human” remains the most logical explanation. Although U.S. intelligence agencies have gathered some new evidence, the additional information does not enable them to draw final conclusions the lab in the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. However, there is a new surge of interest about the lab, which President Donald J. Trump and some of his top aides often blamed for the pandemic. Some scientists think the renewed focus on the lab is related to Trump’s departure from the White House — and being less identified with the theory — while others are upset with the recent W.H.O. report that was co-written by Chinese scientists.
President Biden said that the intelligence community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios” but had not fully answered the question. Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, has been bringing together officials with divergent views to discuss them, to review the shifting science and to push for additional intelligence collection, but Biden’s order was an abrupt example of presidential intervention in the collection of raw data by those charged with collecting and analyzing intelligence on his behalf. He had asked in March for an internal assessment of the virus’s origins, which was delivered to him two weeks ago. The statement describing the lack of consensus among intelligence agencies was ready this week, but Biden felt that it would not help clarify the issue for the public. Then China took a hard line against cooperating with the W.H.O. on further inquiries, prompting Biden to have the U.S. dig deeper.
Meanwhile, Senators Mike Braun of Indiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri, both Republicans, passed a bill to declassify intelligence related to any potential links between the Chinese lab and the origins of the pandemic through unanimous consent. It came after the Senate on Tuesday unanimously agreed to include two Republican provisions to a huge package of China legislation aimed at prohibiting sending American funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology or to China-based “gain of function” research, in which scientists intentionally try to make a pathogen more powerful.
According to Hawley, “For over a year, anyone asking questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been branded as a conspiracy theorist. The world needs to know if this pandemic was the product of negligence at the Wuhan lab, but the C.C.P. has done everything it can to block a credible investigation.”
Recently, the White House played down the need for an investigation led by the United States and insisted that the W.H.O. was the proper place for an international inquiry. The scientific and political debate about how the virus became a global threat to humans has been going on since the beginning of the pandemic. Many scientists around the world have said that it most likely emerged from an infected animal.
Dr. Robert Garry, a virologist at the Tulane University School of Medicine, believes that there was clear evidence for the coronavirus having emerged naturally through the recombination of genetic material from different bat coronaviruses. The data so far bears the hallmarks of natural recombination, he said, and no signs of human intervention. “The pieces are out there,” Dr. Garry explained. “These viruses mix bits and pieces all the time.”
Others think that the global health crisis was man-made, with the Chinese lab as the likely source of the pathogen. Trump often accused the Chinese government of covering up the incident, and Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, said it might have been created in a Chinese bioweapons lab.
In the last days of the last administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a fact sheet about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, suggesting evidence that the virus might have emerged accidentally from the facility. Among other points, Pompeo said that the government had “reason to believe that several researchers inside the W.I.V. became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the information about the sick researchers released by Pompeo had been contained in intelligence documents prepared at the end of the Trump administration. At least two intelligence documents produced recently discuss the sick workers, according to an American official. One is narrowly focused on information about the three people, and a broader document put the intelligence in the context of what is known about the origins of the coronavirus.
“It is most likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the possibility of some kind of a lab accident,” said Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told senators on Wednesday.