In August 2021, President Biden ordered a full-scale assessment of whether the novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19, had leaped from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese lab.
The answer to that question was more than just scientific curiosity. At the time, very little was known about the virus, and understanding its origins could lead to treatments, especially a vaccine, to combat it.
The FBI had concluded with "moderate confidence" that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And they weren't alone. A critical intelligence estimate from the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) agreed with them. Three scientists from NCMI conducted a genomic analysis and discovered a man-made "spike protein" that enabled the virus to evade the body's natural defenses and enter human cells far more easily than the bat virus was originally able to do.
The techniques used to construct the protein were found in a 2008 paper by a Wuhan scientist. This should have come close to clinching the lab-leak theory, at least as far as the U.S. intelligence agency assessment was concerned.
However, those engaged in the assessment never heard the evidence from NCMI about the manufactured spike protein. What's more, the three scientists at NMCI were told not to share their findings about the protein with the FBI. The bureau had "gone off the reservation," according to a superior at NMCI. Not surprisingly, the FBI was not invited to the National Intelligence Council briefing that reported on the intelligence community's assessment of COVID-19.
Momentum then turned against the lab-leak theory when a group of 20 scientists published a letter in The Lancet claiming that it was a virtual certainty that COVID-19 had emerged naturally like every other pandemic disease in history and that the lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory." A month later, a paper on the "proximal origins" of COVID dismissed the lab-leak theory out of hand, claiming the virus jumped from bats to another intermediate animal (yet to be found) and then to humans.
Science craves consensus. And to get it, the scientific community can be brutal in squelching opposing views, especially those with little evidence to support them. The spike protein evidence would have almost certainly changed some minds in the intelligence community about the origins of COVID-19. However, it was withheld from the national intelligence assessment for reasons yet to be determined.
More than three years after that briefing, the intelligence agencies continue to investigate, though the full-court press that was mounted during the 90-day sprint is long over. In one sign that some government agencies are still looking at the issue, the Energy Department last year joined the FBI in identifying a lab leak as the most likely source.
In a June 2023 report requested by Congress, Haines’s office also declassified more information about the Wuhan institute. The report noted that some of the institute’s scientists “have genetically engineered coronaviruses using common laboratory practices.” But it added that the U.S. intelligence community had no information that this work involved the virus that caused the pandemic or a “close progenitor,” or that the institute held such viruses in its stockpiles before the 2019 outbreak.
One FBI scientist suggests, “What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined.”
It didn't have to be like this. China's behavior in this investigation has been unconscionable and puts them outside the circle of civilized nations. The evidence that China knows a lot more about the origins of COVID-19 is growing, including the fact that a Chinese military researcher applied for a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine just weeks after the virus was first sequenced in 2020. He later died after "jumping" off the roof of the Wuhan lab.
This assessment was not going to be just another report that no one reads and files away in an inconsequential office. The intelligence assessment contained actionable recommendations to be adopted by the entire U.S. government on a pandemic that was killing tens of thousands of Americans. That intelligence agencies were willing to shape the official assessment based on political considerations needs to come out.
Congress is now going to take another shot at Anthony Fauci, PeterDaszak, and other scientists whose advocacy for dangerous research at a third-world lab in Wuhan may have led to the release of a virus that has already killed more than six million people.
