According to persons acquainted with the confidential paper, an assessment on the origins of Covid-19 by a US government national laboratory determined that the theory that the virus spilled from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is probable and warrants additional research. This report has been published by the Wall Street Journal.
The analysis was completed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California in May 2020, and it was used by the State Department in their investigation of the pandemic’s origins during the Trump administration’s last months.
President Biden has ordered that US intelligence agencies report to him within weeks on how the virus emerged, which has reignited attention in Congress. Mr. Biden stated that US intelligence has been focusing on two scenarios: whether the coronavirus was spread through human contact with an infected animal or through a laboratory error.
According to US government sources, three researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology felt so ill in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a still-classified US intelligence assessment distributed during former President Donald Trump’s administration.
Wuhan Lab Theory: The Background
In the early days of the outbreak, after the first instances of COVID-19, the lab leak idea was generally ignored in public scientific debate.
According to observers, the notion became inextricably linked with former US President Donald Trump’s harsh anti-China rhetoric and xenophobic framing of the pandemic in the months afterwards, having a chilling effect within the scientific community.
The surge in popular support comes in the aftermath of a worldwide health study commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Wuhan, which was panned by major Western nations and notable scientists for being grossly inadequate and depending on data gathered by Chinese officials.
The February report said it was “likely to very likely” the virus emerged through a natural zoonotic, or animal-to-human, transmission while concluding the theory it accidentally leaked from a lab was “extremely unlikely”. China has repeatedly denied the lab was responsible for leaking the virus.