Covid-19 most likely began with Wuhan lab accident, US intelligence agency says
The Covid-19 pandemic is most likely to have begun as a result of an accident by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to analysts at one US intelligence agency cited in a newly declassified report.
The US intelligence services on Friday released a declassified version of their report to President Joe Biden on the origins of the pandemic, which details for the first time why some analysts believe it to have started at the Chinese lab.
According to the report, analysts at one unnamed agency believe the virus most plausibly started in bats in China’s Yunnan province, before being brought to Wuhan by scientists experimenting on a range of coronaviruses.
Other agencies said they believed — though with a lesser degree of confidence — that the virus jumped into humans straight from animals, possibly through the Wuhan wet market, which sold live animals.
The findings are likely to reignite the already heated debate over whether China — and even the US, which funded research at the Wuhan lab — bears responsibility for the pandemic.
They come just days before Anthony Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies to Congress, where he is likely to be grilled on why he approved a $600,000 grant that was used for risky coronavirus research at Wuhan.
The report said: “Although the [intelligence community] has no indications that WIV research involved Sars-Cov-2 [the virus that causes Covid-19] or a close progenitor virus, these analysts note that it is plausible that researchers may have unwittingly exposed themselves to the virus without sequencing it during experiments or sampling activities, possibly resulting in asymptomatic or mild infection.”
This account would explain why neither Sars-Cov-2 nor anything very closely resembling it have been identified among the coronavirus samples sequenced at the Wuhan lab.
The report makes it clear, however, that without Beijing’s co-operation, US intelligence officials are largely relying on circumstantial evidence to construct their arguments. The agency that believes an accident happened at the Wuhan lab does so because of the type of research that was being conducted there and the fact that some of it was being done at relatively low biosafety levels.
The Wall Street Journal revealed earlier this year that three researchers at the Wuhan lab fell ill in autumn 2019 with Covid-like symptoms. But the report said this did not in itself provide an answer to the question of how the pandemic started.
Several agencies continue to believe, however, that the virus is most likely to have jumped into humans directly from animals, pointing out that China did not appear to have any forewarning about the spread of the new disease.
The report said: “[These analysts] see the potential that a laboratory worker inadvertently was infected while collecting unknown animal specimens to be less likely than an infection occurring through numerous hunters, farmers, merchants and others who have frequent, natural contact with animals.”
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