The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified report recently provided to the White House and several members of Congress.
Previously, the Energy Department was undecided on the pandemic’s origins. The new information appeared as an update to a classified 2021 report by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
The U.S. intelligence community has yet to form a consensus on how the pandemic started. The FBI and the Energy Department favor the lab leak theory while four other intelligence agencies believe in the zoonotic transmission theory. Two agencies are undecided.
The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.
The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.
One theory that now appears debunked is the idea that the leak of the coronavirus happened in connection with a Chinese biological weapons program. If a leak did occur at the Wuhan Institute, it was not part of any military activities at the lab.
But what isn’t ruled out is the runaway gain-of-function research that was carelessly leaked from a lab that had a horrific safety record.
U.S. national-security adviser Jake Sullivan, asked about the Journal’s reporting Sunday, said President Biden had repeatedly directed every part of the intelligence community to invest in trying to discern as much as possible about the origins of the pandemic. “President Biden specifically requested that the national labs, which are part of the Department of Energy, be brought into this assessment because he wants to put every tool at use to be able to figure out what happened here,” Mr. Sullivan said during an appearance on CNN.
There are a “variety of views in the intelligence community,” Mr. Sullivan added. “A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information.”
We’re never going to get any kind of definitive information as long as the Chinese Communist government is sitting on so much data regarding the earliest patients who contracted COVID-19. The current theory is that the virus began appearing in November 2019. But there is evidence that the virus was active in Wuhan months before that. Information about those first patients would tell researchers a lot, including the gross incompetence and negligence of the Chinese, making them responsible for six million deaths worldwide.
Related: IG Report Skewers EcoHealth Alliance and NIH for Using Taxpayer Money for Research Into Bat Viruses
Any information on paper kept by Beijing is long gone — shredded or burned. But many of the people involved are still alive and may eventually be persuaded to speak.
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