If administration officials have doubts about the lab-leak theory, they should answer the scientists who argue that it is a very plausible explanation.
Even following WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s call this week for “further investigation” into whether the COVID pandemic began as a leak from a laboratory, the Biden administration is doubling down on a refusal to publicly boost the possibility.
Tedros’s comments followed the release of a highly anticipated report by a team of WHO-appointed researchers and Chinese scientists about the origins of the coronavirus. When asked by National Review on Wednesday if Secretary of State Antony Blinken agrees with Tedros’s assessment that the lab-leak hypothesis ought to be investigated further, the State Department dodged.
“We continue to learn more about the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its origins, so we can better prepare for future public-health crises. Our experts are reviewing the report now,” a spokesperson told NR. “But let me say that this is why the WHO investigation has to be left to the scientists and the experts to lay out without any interference . . . because that’s the only way we’re going to know what the origins of this are.”
Blinken has expressed significant doubts about the study. “We’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it,” he said on CNN ahead of the report’s release.
As far as the lab-leak theory is concerned, though, it’s worth noting that numerous scientists and experts have called for taking a closer look at the possibility that the disease initially escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Following the conclusion of a WHO-organized mission to China, a group of 26 scientists released a letter calling for a new investigation, as the WHO’s work had been severely restricted by the Chinese government. They called for examination of all possible hypotheses, including “Lab Acquired Infection (LAI) in one of the laboratories in Wuhan” and “Lab-escape without LAI, for instance via waste handling or animals that escaped or were disposed of inappropriately.”
The joint WHO-China study released on Tuesday downplayed the possibility that the virus was the result of a lab accident, calling it “extremely unlikely” and ranking it the least likely of four possibilities considered.
The WHO director-general, however, expressed his strong disagreement with that finding during a press conference on the report. Calling their assessment not “extensive enough,” Tedros said: “Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation, potentially with additional missions involving specialist experts, which I am ready to deploy.”
Some of the strongest circumstantial evidence that can be cited to support the lab-leak hypothesis comes from a January 15 fact sheet issued by the State Department during the final days of the Trump administration. As NR’s editorial on the WHO report notes, the document revealed that the U.S. “has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019,” that researchers in the lab worked with “RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2,” and that the facility “collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military,” despite posing as a civilian research institution.
A senior administration official told the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin in March that the Biden administration does not dispute the intelligence in the fact sheet, though it believes that the Trump team “put spin on the ball” in favor of a lab leak by promoting these findings. PBS NewsHour this week also quoted a senior administration official as confirming the intelligence but adding that “the January statement was not a complete story, and the intelligence community does not have high confidence in any origin theory.”
Thus far, the only public comments by an administration official on lab leak have come from Dr. Anthony Fauci during a White House press briefing last Friday. After former CDC director Robert Redfield said that he believes COVID escaped from a lab, Fauci called the theory that COVID spread from wild animals “the more likely, which most public-health officials agree with,” and carefully explained that he thought Redfield “was just expressing an opinion and an option of what it could be.”
If other administration officials have doubts about the lab-leak theory, they should also explain why publicly, and answer the scientists who argue that it is a very plausible explanation.