The US government has been tied up for three years over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, frustrated that China’s obstruction of investigations and unwillingness to scrutinize its own investigations has obscured what intelligence agencies can learn about whether the virus is out of control. a laboratory has escaped .
Investigations during the Trump and Biden administrations have yielded no definitive answers. The Energy Department and FBI favored the theory that a lab leak could have caused the pandemic. Five intelligence agencies considered natural transmission theories — that the coronavirus developed naturally and was transmitted to humans at a pet market or other location — more likely. But the CIA, the nation’s largest spy agency, wouldn’t make an assessment with even a low level of confidence.
Intelligence agencies are expected to release declassified materials this week about what they have learned about the origins of Covid, a topic of great interest and attention among US lawmakers. But people briefed on the material say there is no smoking gun, no evidence affecting the intelligence community as a whole or top CIA analysts, that a lab leak was the more likely cause of the pandemic than natural transmission, or vice versa. .
In fact, senior intelligence officials remain more convinced than ever that the agencies will be unable to collect evidence that solves the puzzle. Local and state authorities in China, US officials say, have destroyed some virus samples and used others for research, all of which could have helped answer the questions about Covid’s origins. But those officials also warn against exaggerating the importance of the destroyed samples.
US intelligence officials also believe the Chinese government hampered the international community’s efforts to better understand the coronavirus in the early months of the outbreak, refusing to collect other information that could have helped the investigation. Essentially there now seems to be no secret to stealing.
According to US intelligence investigations, Chinese officials are either convinced the virus was caused by natural transmission or do not want to investigate further for fear it could damage their international reputation if, for example, evidence emerges that illustrates shoddy practices or unsafe practices . experiments in one of their laboratories. In 2021, China also tried to influence a World Health Organization investigation, angering the Biden administration.
The material released is unlikely to satisfy the debate over the origins of Covid. Some lawmakers and experts have argued that China’s failure to open its laboratories to outside researchers is evidence of a cover-up and suggests the coronavirus may have accidentally leaked from a lab.
A Government Accountability Office report released last week highlighted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology failed to provide information to the National Institutes of Health about research it had conducted on potentially dangerous pathogens. The report found that money from the US government had gone to the Wuhan lab, one of the labs at the center of investigations into the origins of Covid. The lab had exceeded the safety threshold in some studies, but the NIH or its contractor had not properly monitored the work, the report said.
The report raised questions about the effectiveness of government restrictions designed to prevent scientists receiving US funding from creating more deadly viruses, but it provided no evidence that the Wuhan lab had made a more dangerous coronavirus, let alone the pathogen that caused Covid.
Recent news reports have provided new information about researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in 2019. The news reports suggested that one of them could be patient zero. The information about the sick workers was first discovered at the end of the Trump administration. However, by August 2022, intelligence analysts had dismissed the evidence, saying it was irrelevant. Intelligence officials determined that the sick employees could not tell them whether a lab leak or natural transmission was more likely. Intelligence agencies are taking a neutral view of the information on the cases, arguing that they do not support the lab leak or natural transmission case, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.
US officials also warn that their intelligence collection is imperfect. Before the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention were not a priority collection target for US intelligence agencies. And China quickly blocked sources of information that could have provided evidence.
Complicating the picture is information gathered by US agencies that illustrated high levels of tension between local officials in Wuhan and leaders in Beijing, especially at the start of the pandemic. Local officials, trying to save their jobs and cover up the severity of the pandemic, covered up what was happening in Wuhan. Chinese officials have not acknowledged such tensions.
To protect their information-gathering methods, US officials declined to discuss how they collected information on Chinese officials or their discussions of the Covid pandemic.
US officials say it is still possible that new evidence will come to light, something like a treasure trove of data a scientist has tucked away or a new source of information to provide further insight. But as time passes, that becomes less likely, especially as memories fade or resources become out of reach.
As an intelligence matter, officials said, the trail has gone cold.
