The Central Intelligence Agency has officially changed its stance on how the covid-19 pandemic began. In an assessment released over the weekend, the agency said it now believes the coronavirus responsible for covid-19 most likely leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, rather than from direct animal-to-human transmission.
Recently enshrined CIA director John Ratcliffe declassified and published the results of the estimate Saturday. While the CIA now supports the so-called laboratory leak theory about the origins of covid-19, however, the agency has stated that it only has a “low degree of confidence” in its conclusion. In addition, the agency did not rule out the possibility that covid-19 might emerge naturally.
“[The CIA] continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the Covid-19 pandemic remain plausible,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement released Saturday.
China furiously rejected the CIA’s findings. “The conclusion that laboratory kelp is extremely unlikely was reached by the joint fact-finding team of China and WHO based on field visits to relevant laboratories in Wuhan,” foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning said. press conference held on Monday.
The debate over where covid-19 really came from has raged for years. In the conspiracy-laden parts of the internet, some people go so far as to argue that China deliberately designed and released covid-19 as a bioweapon. Another theory is that China (and possibly the United States) turned a blind eye to dangerous virus research being conducted in Wuhan — research that eventually led to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus escaping the lab and infecting humans. In this scenario, the virus may simply have been collected from the wild and then leaked, or its ancestor may have been experimented on first and then turned into a virus that could easily infect humans.
China has certainly done itself no favors in dispelling suspicions about its role in the pandemic. Its leadership limited information about covid-19 early on, silencing doctors who tried to warn others about the threat. And it has hampered efforts by outside groups, including the World Health Organization, to investigate the origins of the virus, even for this day. That said, either scenario would be embarrassing for the country as China has promised to improve its own surveillance of emerging diseases in the wake of the 2002 epidemic of the original SARS virus, caused by animal-to-human transmission.
Although there are famous scientists and health officials who support the lab theory (including President Donald Trump’s former CDC chief, Robert Redfield), it does not seem to be the majority opinion among relevant experts. An inquiry done last fall of virologists and epidemiologists in the field, for example, found that most were in favor of a natural zoonotic origin (the virus spreading from animals to humans) for covid-19. Recent studies have also provided more suggestive evidence that the virus likely circulated among animals that would have come into close contact with humans during the earliest days of the pandemic—a necessary step for zoonotic transmission, if not a bona fide smoking gun for it.
The new CIA assessment began under the direction of former CIA Director William Burns during the Biden administration. Critics argue that the results were published to advance the policy of the new director of the agency, a a longtime supporter of the laboratory leak theory. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Organization (SIGHT) at the University of Saskatchewan, notes that Ratcliffe and other intelligence officials created together “fact sheet” that made the case for a lab leak during the last days of the first Trump administration. It’s a case filled with unsupported claims about the lab where the virus allegedly leaked from, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, she argues.
“The new rating is probably the result of uncritically accepting the claims of this fact sheet as correct when there is no real basis for doing so,” Rasmussen, who himself did. research looking at the origins of covid-19, said Gizmodo.
Importantly, the CIA admits that its changed stance on the origins of covid-19 was not driven by any major new intelligence. The FBI and the Energy Department also supported the laboratory leak theory as the likely origin, but at least five other secret services recently believe that a zoonotic origin is more likely. Given the low confidence in its own findings, the CIA’s new assessment is unlikely to sway anyone firmly in the zoonotic (ie animal transmission) camp. But Rasmussen believes the rating will make it easier for the renewed Trump administration to pursue its less-than-virtuous goals elsewhere.
“The ‘work leak’ furthers policy goals of the Trump administration, including halting infectious disease and vaccine research, eradicating public health, eroding trust in science and scientists, and exacting revenge against perceived political opponents,” Rasmussen said. “It is in the service of those goals that this assessment has been changed and is not a scientific change.”
