It will be a pleasant surprise if the U.S. intelligence community’s review of the COVID-19 origin comes to any definitive answers.
We are now almost halfway through the 90-day period that President Biden set for the U.S. intelligence community to redouble “efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about the origin of COVID-19. Sometime in the middle of July, President Biden is scheduled to receive an update on those efforts.
It will be a pleasant surprise if the U.S. intelligence community’s review comes to any definitive answers, or even leans strongly in one direction between the lab-leak hypothesis and hypothesis that the virus jumped into a human being in some manner entirely unconnected to either of Wuhan’s two laboratories studying novel coronaviruses in bats. Avril Haines, the U.S. director of national intelligence, appears to be attempting to lower expectations surrounding the review.
Concrete proof, as opposed to circumstantial evidence, will be hard to find. Maybe some sort of communications intercepted by the National Security Agency could indicate that Chinese government officials knew about a lab accident, or some ignored safety precautions, at one of the Wuhan labs. Beyond that, the intelligence community will only be able to state, “from what we discern, this scenario is more likely than that one.”
Perhaps the least likely scenario is that the intelligence community’s review concludes that a lab leak or accident is the more likely cause of the pandemic. If members of the intelligence community are not absolutely certain about such a consequential accusation, they are not likely to lean in that direction. There are simply too many forces lined up to knock down that claim already.
First, the U.S. intelligence community publicly making that accusation would lead to an absolutely volcanic reaction from the Chinese government. Back in April 2020, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison declared, “This is a virus that has taken more than 200,000 lives across the world. It has shut down the global economy. The implications and impacts of this are extraordinary. Now, it would seem entirely reasonable and sensible that the world would want to have an independent assessment of how this all occurred, so we can learn the lessons and prevent it from happening again.”
That mundane statement was enough to enrage Beijing’s leaders, and they set out to make an example out of Australia. China quickly implemented sanctions on imports of Australian barley, beef and lamb, wine, cotton, lobsters, timber, coal, among other products. Australian exports to China dropped by 40 percent in most categories, and Australia has filed complaints with the World Trade Organization. Until 2020, Australian exports to China were growing rapidly, exceeding more than $100 billion in U.S. dollars.
If you think Chinese trade sanctions can’t force Western governments to gradually shift their stances, consider Norway:
In October 2010, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel peace prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. The Chinese government responded by freezing political and economic relations with Norway, introducing sanctions against imports of fish and other products, and limiting diplomatic interaction. Using a synthetic control approach, this paper estimates the effect of Chinese sanctions on Norwegian exports to China, and on Norwegian foreign policy. We find that the sanctions reduced direct exports of fish to China by between 125 and 176 million USD in the period 2011-13, and direct total exports from Norway to China by between 780 and 1300 million USD. By 2014, however, exports had rebounded to normal levels. Moreover, immediately following the peace prize, Norwegian agreement with Chinese voting on UN human rights resolutions increased. The results suggest that the Chinese government can effectively use economic sanctions to affect the foreign policy positions of democratic governments.
In other words, the U.S. intelligence community publicly declaring that a lab accident is the more likely cause of the pandemic would probably set off an unprecedented conflict with China – one that Joe Biden may prefer to avoid or postpone.
You’ll see a lot of speculation that Biden has been effectively bought off by China, either because of his son Hunter Biden’s investment partners, his appointed ambassador’s ties to Chinese donations to the University of Pennsylvania, or his cabinet members who, during the Trump years with WestExec, attempted to help multinational companies expand into the Chinese market. But even if none of those figures or issues represented a conflict of interest, Biden might still hesitate before setting off an unpredictable presidency-defining conflict with China. As recently as 2019, Biden was scoffing at the notion that China represented a serious competitor or threat to the United States. Biden’s not a China hawk and he never has been. He’s going to tread exceptionally carefully about a claim as explosive as this one.
Beyond Biden, Congressional Democrats are openly stating that to them, investigating the origin of the virus represents an effort to get President Trump off the hook for his administration’s mistakes during the pandemic:
“It’s really tough, because whatever is uncovered, it will be used in terrible ways,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “You almost can’t have a legitimate investigation.”
…Yet many Democratic lawmakers told POLITICO they remain ambivalent about the need to investigate Covid’s source, fearing it will detract from their efforts to focus on the Trump administration’s chaotic response. They’re also concerned the focus will fuel conspiracy theories and anti-Asian rhetoric that have already proliferated around the possibility of a lab leak.
A lot of Democrats would prefer that the question of how the pandemic started remained an unsolvable mystery, so they could turn their attention back towards the Trump administration’s early missteps and the president’s statements.
Attitudes in Congress will not necessarily alter the thinking or the conclusions of the intelligence community. But you have to wonder how eager Haines or anyone else will be to offer a conclusion that the administration and its allies really don’t want to hear.