Another government agency has found a laboratory leak to be the most likely explanation behind the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, the Department of Energy recently revised its assessment of the origins of the pandemic to conclude that a lab leak was the most likely origin of the disease. While the assessment was made with “low confidence,” the department switched from its previous stance, “undecided,” after receiving new intelligence, studying research on the topic, and consulting with experts.
The Journal reports this Department of Energy analysis was conducted by “Z Division,” the intelligence arm of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which specializes in assessments of the nuclear- and biological-weapons activities of foreign states; their work is rarely declassified, and, when it is, it is often heavily redacted. It is worth noting that in June 2021, the same Journal reporters reported that Z Division studied the genomes of the virus, SARS-CoV-2, and concluded that “the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation.”
There’s still no airtight evidence that proves any theory outright, and the intelligence community remains split between the possibility of a lab leak and that of a purely natural, or zoonotic, origin. But the embarrassing failure of opinion-makers who decried the lab-leak theory as unscientific and racist looks even worse with each new development.
At the outset of the pandemic, U.S. national-security hawks such as Senator Tom Cotton — a member of the Senate intelligence committee — and then–secretary of state Mike Pompeo asserted that a lab-leak explanation was very plausible. Rather than treating that theory seriously, however, progressive media figures slandered the theory’s proponents, with support from researchers who stood to lose out on a small fortune in grants for coronavirus research in China if such funding was cut off in a backlash.
The mainstream consensus began to shift, though, as more information trickled out of China and the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy.
There were cables in which U.S. diplomats raised concerns about biosafety practices at Chinese laboratories. In the waning days of the Trump administration, the State Department revealed that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had gotten sick with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019. Within months, the possibility of a lab leak had become so much more acceptable that a number of the world’s top coronavirus researchers wrote a letter in Science magazine to urge other scientists to keep an open mind about the matter. And, eventually, President Biden ordered the intelligence community to look into the origins of the pandemic.
That community-wide assessment is clearly yielding some interesting results. The Department of Energy now stands with the FBI, which has assessed with “moderate confidence” that a lab leak was likely, while four other agencies back an exclusively natural origin of the pandemic.
All of this needs further investigation, but the Journal’s reporting is an important reminder of the time lost at the outset of the pandemic. As the Chinese regime did everything in its power to restrict international access to critical data from the Wuhan lab and slapped trade sanctions on Australia for pushing an impartial investigation into the pandemic’s origins, Congress should have investigated aggressively. Instead, progressive commentators cast the early lab-leak proponents — including our Jim Geraghty — as conspiracy theorists.
Now, potentially fragile bipartisan coalitions in the Senate and newly seated House Republican committee chairs empowered with subpoena power will have to make up for lost time. There’s undoubtedly much more to learn, including about aspects of U.S. coronavirus-research funding — and the role that organizations such as the EcoHealth Alliance research nonprofit played at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Beijing is certainly not opening up the facility, offering important data, or making key figures available for interviews. But the leads that can be chased elsewhere must be chased. And more information about intelligence-community assessments on the matter should be declassified and made public, to the greatest extent possible.
The true story behind the pandemic’s emergence might never be known in anything approaching meaningful detail. But we owe it to the victims of the pandemic to learn as much as possible about the chain of events that, coupled with the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian incompetence, unleashed this plague on the world. After Beijing’s crackdown on heroes, such as Dr. Li Wenliang, who tried to warn the world about the virus, the general lack of interest in learning the true origin of this catastrophe up to this point may be the biggest scandal.