The report was delivered to the White House on Tuesday and its lack of certainty “underscores the importance of inducing China to share lab records, genomic samples, and other data” in order to determine the true origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the Covid-19 illness.
Discoveries in the report include “buried intelligence agencies’ files” about three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) falling sick with Covid-like symptoms months before the pandemic officially began. This was a story initially broken by the Wall Street Journal in May, and it was one of the catalysts that sparked the notion that a lab-leak origin needed to be investigated. Also in May, 18 scientists wrote a letter published in the journal Science saying that a laboratory accident was a viable hypothesis in need of testing.
The new report outlines the chain of events starting with the initial intelligence discovery of the sick lab workers during the Trump administration. In December 2020, the State Department began assembling a fact sheet on fresh intelligence. Around the same time the arms-control bureau started drafting an official diplomatic complaint known as a démarche which would be delivered to Chinese officials. It specifically questioned whether research at the WIV violated the Biological Weapons Convention, citing links between the Chinese military and the WIV.
Infighting within the State Department stalled both the drafting of the démarche and the new fact sheet. Yet by mid-January, “a senior official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence signed off on the conclusions to be included in the State Department fact sheet, which was issued on Jan. 15,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
A draft of the démarche by Thomas DiNanno, then head of the State’s Department’s arms control bureau, specifically asked “why a Chinese military virologist had been sent to the Wuhan Institute during the Covid crisis and questioned whether the lab’s activities were consistent with the Biological Weapons Convention requirement that research be done for peaceful purposes.” It also addressed “allegations Beijing had carried out research aimed at developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities,” as well as Beijing’s lack of transparency from the start of the pandemic.
But disagreements between officials led to an impasse and with the Trump administration then only days from leaving office, the diplomatic note was never delivered to Chinese officials. After the Biden administration was sworn in, DiNanno’s replacement dropped the issue altogether, until the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the sick WIV lab workers in May.
Today, a group of eleven scientists, and members of the international team that went to China in March to investigate the origins of the pandemic, penned a commentary in the journal Nature warning that time is running out to find the necessary data that could decisively show the true origins of the virus.
“The window of opportunity for conducting this crucial inquiry is closing fast,” the group said, warning that it would soon be “biologically impossible” to obtain reliable information about those who may have been infected with the pathogen in 2019. They repeated an earlier call for a second phase of new studies, but said that they were being hindered by a lack of consensus at the World Health Organization. They also expressed concern over a proposal at the WHO to turn the investigation over to a new advisory group, saying that, “Applying this new process to the continuing SARS-CoV-2 origins mission runs the risk of adding several months of delay.”
The group noted that their March investigation in China was constrained because of an agreement between China and the WHO that limited the amount of time they were allowed in the country as well as the questions they were allowed to ask. Their request for further studies echos previous calls for the same from other prominent scientists. China has thus far refused to allow a second investigation that would in effect audit the laboratories at the WIV as well as the neighboring wet market, claiming that a second investigation “violated science.”
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Note: For more on the lab-leak hypothesis, see evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein explaining the “preponderance of evidence” pointing to a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2; and his discussion on “consensus science.”
To date, the most comprehensive story on the lab-leak hypothesis was published by Vanity Fair in June, and the revelations are quite shocking. Whether SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab accident or naturally jumped from one species to another, there is demonstrative evidence, via FOIA requests, of those potentially involved (all catalogued in this article) that some virologists participating in gain-of-function research on pathogens fear the possibility of a lab-leak and the potential consequences of a confirmation. Said one official, “If the pandemic started as part of a lab leak, it had the potential to do to virology what Three Mile Island and Chernobyl did to nuclear science.”