In a January 24 interview with the far-right-wing outlet Breitbart News, newly appointed CIA director John Ratcliffe stated that assessing intelligence on a potential Wuhan lab leak was a top priority. The following day, The New York Times reported that the agency had shifted from an undecided stance to favoring a possible Chinese lab leak, albeit with a “low confidence” rating – the lowest on a three-tier scale (low, medium, high).
Within the US intelligence community, the CIA has thus joined the FBI and the Department of Energy (DOE) in supporting the possibility of a laboratory-related incident.
According to a 2023 report, among the US agencies that have investigated the pandemic’s origins, one remains undecided, while four others, along with the National Intelligence Council, lean toward a natural origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.
What does “laboratory origin” really mean?
According to The New York Times, the CIA’s revised assessment is based not on new evidence, but on a reinterpretation of existing data. However, the reasoning behind its reassessment, along with the supporting data, have not been made public, making it impossible to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of the agency’s conclusions.
Adding to the complexity, “laboratory origin” is an umbrella term encompassing multiple, sometimes contradictory, scenarios. Confirming CNN’s 2023 report on the Department of Energy’s revised stance, The New York Times noted that the DOE identifies the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WCDC) as the outbreak’s likely source, while the FBI attributes it to a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). At the time of writing, the CIA had not disclosed which scenario it deems most plausible.
Though WCDC is not an actual research laboratory, some of its employees were participating in wildlife sampling programs at the time of the outbreak. In late 2019, WCDC moved to a location close to the Huanan market. A theory implicating the WCDC confirms evidence that the earliest detected cases are epidemiologically and geographically linked to the market, and suggests that the virus emerged naturally.
In contrast, WIV is a research institute operating across two campuses, one located 12 kilometers from the market as the crow flies and the other, which houses the P4 laboratory, 27 kilometers away. Scenarios implicating WIV generally posit that “gain-of-function” coronavirus experiments – intended to enhance a virus’s transmissibility or virulence – were conducted under biosecurity conditions deemed to be unsafe, at level 2. The presence in Wuhan of a biosafety level 4 laboratory is therefore irrelevant to this scenario.
Florence Débarre, Directrice de recherche CNRS, chercheuse en biologie évolutive, Sorbonne Université. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
