With US intelligence community (IC) still divided on the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic – whether it started with an animal-to-human infection or lab leak – President Joe Biden on Friday said America will partner with like-minded countries to press China to share information on the issue.
“To this day, the PRC (the People’s Republic of China) continues to reject calls for transparency and withhold information, even as the toll of this pandemic continues to rise,” Biden said acknowledging he had received an inconclusive report from the intelligence community.
He added: “We must have a full and transparent accounting of this global tragedy. Nothing less is acceptable.”
As widely reported earlier, Biden received a report from the intelligence community after 90 days on investigation into the origin of the pandemic, which started in China in November of 2019 but hit the United States the hardest with more than 636,000 deaths, the highest for any country.
“After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information … the intelligence community remains divided on the most likely origin of Covid-19,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a short two-page summary of their findings. “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident,” it added.
The summary said four of IC 18 elements and the National Intelligence Council assess with “low confidence” that the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected the virus or something 99% similar. One IC element assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection was caused by a laboratory-associated incident, “probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology”.
Analysts at three IC elements were unable to rally around either of the two theories without more information and some other said both theories were equally likely.
The intelligence community is unable to provide more definitive explanation for the origin unless new information comes along.
But here is what the IC can say with some certainty, according to the summary. The first infections occurred no later than November 2019; the first cluster of cases were in Wuhan; the virus “was not developed as a biological weapon”; most agencies assessed with “low confidence” that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered; however, two agencies believe there was not sufficient evidence to make an assessment either way.
“Finally, the IC assesses China’s officials did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak of Covid-19 emerged.”
The debate over the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has raged around the world especially after former president Donald Trump supported those who argued it emerged from a virology lab in Wuhan city of China, where the epidemic started end of 2019 and then spread rapidly around the world.
Trump’s action was motivated by his desire to shift blame of his mishandling of the fightback in the US, but it was also backed by many scientists such as Robert Redfield, former chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). He said he believed the coronavirus “most likely” escaped a lab.
A WHO report widely seen as unduly accommodative of the Chinese said the virus most likely travelled from animals to humans and that the possibility of a lab leak was “extremely unlikely”.
Efforts to conclusively ascertain the origin of the virus that has killed millions of people around the world, causing the largest global public health crisis in 100 years, have been marred by the lack transparency and cooperation by China, as Biden pointed out in the White House statement.
The US intelligence community was divided as well. Biden had said in May that two agencies believed in the animal-to-human theory and a third agency went with the lab-leak possibility.
“The majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other,” the US president had said then.
The intelligence community is still there, 90 days hence.
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