There is a whole lot of CYA and straight-up lying going on by the people involved.
From Inference Review, Vol. 6, NO. 4 / February 2022:
On August 27, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a summary of the US Intelligence Community’s assessment on the origins of COVID-19.1 Four of the agencies involved and the National Intelligence Council assessed “with low confidence that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus.”2
One of the agencies—later reported as the FBI3—assessed “with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
“These analysts,” the summary continued, “give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses.”4
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there have now been more than 360 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, resulting in over 5.6 million deaths worldwide.5
Questions about the origins of COVID-19 are of more than academic interest.
From Animal HostsZoonosis is considered the default explanation for the outbreak of any new infectious disease. A number of pandemics occurred during the twentieth century, almost all of them of zoonotic origin. The one known exception is the 1977 H1N1 flu pandemic, which was caused by an insufficiently attenuated vaccine candidate that escaped either from a laboratory or from clinical trials.6
A number of disease outbreaks began in Southeast Asia following zoonotic jumps: the Asian flu pandemic (1957), which originated in China; the Hong Kong flu pandemic (1967); and the avian flu outbreak (2005), which was first reported in Vietnam. The first SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) coronavirus outbreak began in China during 2002 and infected more than 8,000 people worldwide between 2002 and 2003, as well as dozens more people in 2004 after several laboratory leaks.
In a 2007 paper for Clinical Microbiology Reviews, a team of virologists from the University of Hong Kong issued a clear warning:
The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.7Horseshoe bats, the genus Rhinolophus, are the natural reservoir for hundreds of coronavirus strains closely related to the SARS virus.8
Once the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak had begun, virologists quickly reached the conclusion that the pandemic was almost certainly of natural origin. In February of 2020, barely a month after the SARS-CoV-2 genome was released, a team led by Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California, published a preprint and then a paper in Nature Medicine entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2.”9 If SARS-CoV-2 had been designed, they argued, it could have been designed better, and since it was not designed better, it most likely was not designed. “While the analyses … suggest that SARS-CoV-2 may bind human ACE2 with high affinity,” the Nature Medicine paper noted, “computational analyses predict that the interaction is not ideal and that the RBD [receptor-binding domain] sequence is different from those shown in SARS-CoV to be optimal for receptor binding.” “The high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2,” the authors concluded,
is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation [emphasis added].10A month before Nature Medicine issued the paper by Andersen et al., The Lancet published a letter signed by 27 leading virologists dismissing the hypothesis that the virus originated in a laboratory:
The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumors and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.11One of the authors of the letter was Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based nonprofit NGO. Since 2004, EcoHealth had been collaborating with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on studies of coronaviruses in bats.12 The relationship between EcoHealth and the WIV was close. A specialist in the transmission of infectious diseases among animals, Daszak was frequently listed as a coauthor on their papers, often alongside the director of the WIV’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, Shi Zhengli.13
The authors of the letter that appeared in The Lancet, Daszak among them, declared that they had reached their conclusions while holding no competing interests. Five months later, the journal issued a demurral with respect to Daszak’s declaration. He updated his statement to clarify his employment at EcoHealth and the nature of EcoHealth’s research in China, and to affirm that their “work in China was previously funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).”14 Daszak’s updated disclosure does not include any mention of the WIV, instead referring to EcoHealth’s “collaboration with a range of universities and governmental health and environmental science organisations.”
On January 14, 2021, a multidisciplinary team of international experts, Daszak among them, traveled to Wuhan to investigate the origins of the virus on behalf of the WHO.15 The study lasted 28 days. The WHO team was given a guided tour of the WIV facilities and they were able to interview some of its scientists. The “introduction [of the virus] through a laboratory incident,” the WHO concluded, “was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.”16 Instead, they argued, “introduction through an intermediate host is considered to be a likely to very likely pathway.”17 Elsewhere in their report, the WHO team repeated assurances they had received during their time in China:
The Wuhan CDC [Center for Disease Control and Prevention] lab which moved on 2nd December 2019 [to a new location near the Huanan market] reported no disruptions or incidents caused by the move. They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.18If, in February of 2021, the WHO’s team of experts were prepared to take the WIV scientists at their word, by August of 2021, some of them confessed to having had reservations all along. In an interview for a Danish television documentary, Peter Ben Embarek, the leader of the WHO team, admitted that Chinese officials had pressured them to drop the laboratory leak hypothesis. “In the beginning, they didn’t want anything about the lab [in the WHO report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that,” Ben Embarek remarked. “We insisted on including it,” he continued, “because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated.”19 Ben Embarek added that there were scenarios under which the laboratory leak hypothesis could be consistent with the assumption that COVID-19 had an animal origin:
A lab employee infected in the field while collecting samples in a bat cave—such a scenario belongs both [emphasis added] as a lab-leak hypothesis and as our first hypothesis of direct infection from bat to human. We’ve seen that hypothesis as a likely hypothesis.20When questioned about the interview by the Washington Post, Ben Embarek initially claimed his remarks had been mistranslated before declining to comment further.21 But Ben Embarek was not the only one expressing reservations. A month earlier, the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, conceded during a press conference that there had been a “premature push” to rule out the laboratory leak hypothesis—comments that contradicted the conclusions of the WHO’s own report, released just a few months beforehand.22 He called on China to allow a full audit of the Wuhan laboratories.23 “I was a lab technician myself, I’m an immunologist, and I have worked in the lab, and lab accidents happen,” Tedros remarked. “It’s common.”24
As it turned out, Tedros had every reason to express caution. To date, nearly 82,000 animal samples have been tested in China for SARS-CoV-2. No intermediate animal host has been identified in Wuhan or anywhere else in the country.25....
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