With the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis gaining prominence within the U.S. intelligence community, various international scientists and some intelligence agencies point at a natural origin for COVID-19, with China baselessly blaming the U.S. military or frozen foods.
FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed last month that the FBI has long believed COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab, and it was recently revealed the Energy Department believes with “low confidence” that the coronavirus started at a Wuhan lab.
THE WUHAN LAB LEAK DEBATE — WHAT WE KNOW ALREADY AND WHAT WE DON'T
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment in August 2021 stating that one U.S. intelligence agency, the FBI, assessed with "moderate confidence" that COVID-19 most likely emerged from the Wuhan lab, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with just "low confidence" that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has spent three years variously claiming that COVID-19 only entered China through the frozen food “cold chain” rather than originating there, as it has pointed the finger at the U.S. military with zero evidence.
The Wet Market
Much of the origin search focus has been on the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, located within eyesight of the Wuhan CDC, a wildlife market that was the site of a large infection event in late December 2019. The U.S. intelligence community assessed that COVID-19 likely emerged in humans “no later than November 2019.”
The ODNI released a further declassified document on COVID-19 in October 2021, and it included a section on “The Case for the Natural Origin Hypothesis,” which argued that the Wuhan lab’s “activities in early 2020 related to SARS-CoV-2 are a strong indicator that the WIV lacked foreknowledge of the virus” and that “the natural infection of a hunter, farmer, or merchant would be more likely than the infection of a lab worker collecting animal specimens.”
Raccoon Dogs
Earlier this month, the New York Times published a story contending that raccoon dogs sold at the Wuhan wet market may have been an intermediary host for COVID-19 and that the foxlike mammals may have helped start the pandemic at the Chinese wet market.
The article cited scientists Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Michael Worobey, Angela Rasmussen, and Stephen Goldstein as being involved in the discovery or analysis of the alleged Chinese data. The outlet claimed Florence Debarre had discovered that new data had been posted by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention on the GISAID genetics website this month but that the data were allegedly removed after international scientists began asking questions about it.
The international scientists published a preprint this month in which they identified animals at the Wuhan wet market, “particularly the common raccoon dog, as the most likely conduits for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019.”
Richard Ebright, the lab director for the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Examiner this month that “the data do not indicate that a raccoon dog was infected with SARS-Cov-2, much less that a raccoon dog was infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to a human.”
Chinese CDC Director George Gao and dozens of other Chinese scientists had issued a paper apparently based on the same data back in February 2022, which concluded that “the market might have acted as an amplifier” but that “no SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the animal samples from the market.”
Daszak and the Hedgehogs
EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its “bat lady” leader Shi Zhengli. Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Institutes of Health bat coronavirus funding to the Chinese institute.
Daszak dismissed the lab leak hypothesis in March 2021 when he admitted he took Wuhan lab workers at their word. Despite EcoHealth breaking NIH rules and the Wuhan lab refusing to hand over relevant information on its coronavirus research, NIH has continued to fund EcoHealth’s viral work to the tune of millions of dollars.
Daszak shared a February study analyzing a novel betacoronavirus, dubbed “MOW-BatCoV,” was found in bats captured in the Moscow region in 2015, and he contended that the “spike gene showed the closest similarity” to coronaviruses from European hedgehogs.
The study touted by Daszak, which pointed to a natural origin for COVID-19, was funded by the Russian government and by the NIH and listed EcoHealth and Daszak as the only U.S. author, along with 11 Russian government-affiliated doctors.
Wuhan Lab
Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Donald Trump, testified this month that it was likely that U.S. taxpayer dollars from the NIH and elsewhere funded Chinese gain-of-function research, which contributed to the origination of SARS-CoV-2.
ODNI's further declassified October 2021 report also included a section titled “The Case for the Laboratory-Associated Incident Hypothesis,” apparently a summary of the FBI’s argument, which said Wuhan lab researchers may have "unwittingly become infected with SARS-CoV-2” and that the researchers conducted research with bat coronaviruses that were "close relatives of SARS-CoV-2.”
Numerous former Trump officials believe COVID-19 began at the Wuhan lab, House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans concluded in 2021 that “the preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory” in late 2019, and Senate Health Committee Republicans assessed last year that the coronavirus “more likely than not” came from the Chinese lab.
President Joe Biden signed into law the “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023” this month, claiming that “my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.”
Frozen Food
The Chinese government long attempted to claim that COVID-19 had come into China via frozen foods in an effort to distance the country from the origins of the pandemic.
Liang Wannian, the head of the Chinese team that worked with the World Health Organization, focused heavily on the possibility that the coronavirus was introduced to humans through frozen food products.
Daszak went on Chinese state-run media in 2021 and claimed that “the cold chain hypothesis — we know that it’s controversial, but there is good evidence from the outbreaks in Beijing” and elsewhere in China. The Chinese government had been pushing this line for months without evidence.
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Fort Detrick
The Chinese government and its state-run outlets have, from the start of the pandemic, continued to deflect from the Wuhan lab leak possibility by pushing a baseless conspiracy theory that COVID-19 originated within the U.S. military.
Beijing has lashed out amid international criticism that Beijing has not been fully cooperative or transparent in global investigations into the origins of the virus. The evidence is overwhelming that the pandemic began in China, and there is no evidence it originated in the United States or with the U.S. military.
The Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens assembled by the WHO said in its first report in June 2021 that "it remains important … to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident."
Then-Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian responded by calling this a politically motivated lie driven by "anti-China" sentiments, and he baselessly pointed to “highly suspicious laboratories such as Fort Detrick.”
The State Department told the Washington Examiner in 2021 that the U.S. “condemns the PRC’s false, baseless, and unscientific claims which undermine the spirit and purpose of an impartial origins investigation.”