The lab leak is back in the news as a U.S. intelligence agency alters its assessment to state that the coronavirus likely originated from a laboratory leak.
The Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is considered authoritative by many as it is involved in biological threats, overseeing a network of 17 laboratories encompassing research in advanced biology, as well as managing the safety of the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the agency’s new assessment was made with “low confidence”, according to people who have read the classified report.
The FBI is the only other U.S. intelligence agency to conclude that the lab leak is the most likely scenario. A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified in October 2021 stated that “one IC [Intelligence Community] element assesses with moderate confidence that COVID-19 most likely resulted from a laboratory associated incident involving WIV or other researchers — either through exposure to the virus during experiments or through sampling”. This element was subsequently identified by the New York Times as the FBI.
U.S. officials on Monday declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each says an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.
Four other agencies in the U.S. still believe that the pandemic was a result of natural zoonotic spillover and two others are undecided, according to the Wall Street Journal. One of the agencies that remains undecided is understood to be the CIA.
Asked about the latest report on CNN on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser, acknowledged that a variety of views are held by the U.S. intelligence community on the origins of the pandemic.
Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other, and a number have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure… Right now there is not a definitive answer to emerge from the intelligence community.
Gilles Demaneuf of DRASTIC spotted back in December that a footnote to the report by the House Intelligence Committee on the Intelligence Community’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak noted that at least one intelligence agency had revised its assessment since the above-mentioned ‘Biden report’ that was declassified in October 2021.
7/ Done with the introduction. Let's jump to the interesting bits:
— Gilles Demaneuf (@gdemaneuf) December 21, 2022There is one major piece of information related to the origins that the report tries hard to downplay:
One IC element revised its origin assessment after the publication of the Biden report (Oct 2021).pic.twitter.com/IUvaxNeo61
From the latest reports, this agency appears to be the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Demaneuf links the change in its assessment to the publication of the DEFUSE funding proposal by DRASTIC in September 2021, which detailed a 2018 plan by U.S. and Chinese researchers to find bat-borne coronaviruses in the wild and insert their spike proteins into existing bat coronaviruses to make them infectious to humans.
But how significant is the changed assessment, really? With most intelligence agencies still apparently favouring a natural origin, the Energy Department only having low confidence in a lab leak, no fresh intelligence or analysis being published and the FBI and Energy Department coming to the conclusion for “different reasons”, the one thing that is for sure is that U.S. intelligence does not have anything approaching definitive proof of a lab leak that it is secretly sitting on (or if it does it is making a good show of not having it).
It’s also worth noting that the FBI’s assessment of “moderate confidence” of a lab leak was said not to involve any engineered viruses but only the leak of natural viruses stored in the lab. This implies it placed no weight on evidence of manipulation or engineering of viruses. The Senate minority staff report on Covid origins from October 2022 stressed alleged evidence of safety issues and poor safety practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and this may be the evidence the FBI was relying on in its assessment. Whether the Energy Department’s newly revised assessment for “different reasons” is based on evidence of manipulation of viruses is unclear as the report has not been made public.
But in any case, as I have noted previously, while the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is an engineered virus is compelling – it has no known animal reservoirs despite extensive searching, it is well-adapted to humans in its earliest recorded cases with no signs of the early genetic diversity that such adaptation would produce, and it is unusually contagious by virtue of having, among other things, a furin cleavage site, which is unknown in SARS-like viruses but often added by scientists to increase infectiousness – the evidence that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in particular is missing.
There is no evidence the WIV was working on SARS-CoV-2 or a precursor to it (and no reason to hide it before the pandemic), and it’s clear the Chinese did not behave in December and January as you would expect if they already knew a highly infectious engineered virus from their lab was on the loose. Senior WIV researcher Dr. Shi Zhengli swiftly published the virus genome in January 2020 alongside that of RaTG13, the closest known virus (at the time) to SARS-CoV-2, and drew attention to the similarities and the fact that it is unlikely the novel virus emerged naturally from the sampled virus.
When in April 2020 leading U.S. virologist Dr. Ralph Baric appeared to point the blame at Dr. Shi Zhengli’s lab in a Newsweek report, she shot back an email to him, now in the public domain, pointing out (correctly) that the earlier work manipulating coronaviruses was done in his lab, not hers. She claimed to have been transparent with all her research.
While we obviously shouldn’t take her word for it on this, it’s fair to say that her team was relatively quick to publish details about the new virus in early 2020, whereas U.S. scientists have consistently failed to cooperate with all investigations into virus origins. Jeffrey Sachs even disbanded the Covid origins taskforce which formed part of the Lancet Covid commission he was chairing, perceiving severe conflicts of interest among the U.S. scientists involved and a basic lack of cooperation.
The latest shift to a “low confidence” assessment by the Energy Department for unstated reasons changes nothing about what we know. The timing would even make the cynical wonder if it was done more to increase diplomatic pressure on China as it looks set to provide lethal aid to Russia.
As I see it, the most pressing question on Covid origins – which could be answered without any cooperation from China at all – is what the U.S. is hiding by all its obfuscation and refusal to cooperate or investigate. The fact that U.S. intelligence analysts claimed to have been tracking the virus since November 2019, despite it being plain that the outbreak was not detectable at the time, have given many cause for suspicions about how the U.S. knew about the outbreak at that point. How this engineered virus came to be in Wuhan remains as much of a mystery as ever, but as long as the U.S. maintains its wall of silence on investigating origins, the suspicions of the world will fall not only on China.
A recap of our recent series on the origins of the virus and the potential role of the United States.
- “How Did U.S. Intelligence Spot the Virus in Wuhan Weeks Before China?” – Looks at what the U.S. knew and when.
- “U.S. Accidentally Proves It Could Not Have Spotted the Virus in China in November 2019” – Revisits the Harvard study that claimed to back up the claims of U.S. intelligence to have detected the outbreak in November 2019.
- “U.S. Government Identified as Original Source of Lab Leak Theory. What’s Really Going On?” – Unpicks the activity of U.S. intelligence and Government officials in relation to the lab leak theory.
- “Why the Lab Leak Theory is Almost Certainly False” – Makes the case for an engineered virus but against a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
- “Does China’s ‘Cover-Up’ of the Lab Leak Betray its Guilt?” – Rebuts claims that the Chinese engaged in an incriminating cover-up from the beginning of 2020.
Plus two posts on the evidence of early spread around the world in late 2019.
- “The Evidence COVID-19 Was Spreading Silently Around the World in Late 2019” – Overview of the early spread evidence and what it means for the behaviour of the virus.
- “How We Know it Started in Wuhan” – Why, despite the evidence of early spread globally since at least November 2019, the virus likely first emerged in Wuhan.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I would strongly advise John Gray to stick to his day job – philosophising, because it is clear from the above that he has done absolutely zero research on net zero.
“Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human-induced climate change is in the works, it goes on for decades or even centuries.”
Can you provide any proof of “human induced climate change?”
No. Well STFU!
Why is DS printing utter garbage such as this?
Not only DS, why is Uherd giving him a voice?
“ He thought that climate change would consist of sudden jumps and it could transform things quite quickly, in a couple of decades. We might be in the middle of it. That’s my view – I’m not a climate sceptic.”
’Sudden jumps’: according to the geological data ‘sudden’ is tens of thousands or millions of years.
There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change.
Really..? The only thing that is ‘running away’ is the hysterical reaction of people who have followed the hyperbole, but have forgotten to ask critical questions or think for themselves.
And your comments earlier today under New Round-up, and those of JeremyP99 with the graphs are equally valid here.
Mr Gray is a Bernard Looney…..
The great game was, in fact, simple paranoia; Russia then, as now, a paper tiger.
China seems likely, particularly economically, to follow the well trodden path of so many socialist fascist states, something to which Britain itself should pay heed….tin eared though its political apparatchiks currently appear…..
As long as people like John Gray, “political philosopher,” stipulate that emissions are causing a runaway climate crisis it doesn’t really matter what else he has to say. He’s giving the “CO2 will kill us all” loonies all the ammunition they need to destroy the west and kill billions world-wide with their insane Net Zero bollox.
Sad to say that at this time Exhibit A of the CO2 Will Kill Us All Loonies includes most Western governments.
Perhaps he can explain how CO2 at levels of 150ppm drove the climate out of Ice Ages, then at levels of 4 000pppm, 6 000ppm and above, managed to drive the climate out of tropical ages back into Ice Ages.
Until any of these idiots can explain that, I’m not interested in their ramblings.
“Worth reading in full.”
I don’t think so.
“There is a serious possibility that we’re now in the early stages of runaway climate change.”
Evidence please? There is nothing to indicate a ‘runaway climate change’, nothing. What does a runaway climate change look like and Michael Bay type films are not evidence? There is plenty of evidence that the inter-glacial that we are currently in will end sometime in the next 500 years, and end it will. If we have somehow, and inadvertently, manged to stop the next glacial expansion then we will have dodged a massive bullet, except the forces that dictate the glacial cycles have not stopped, so I don’t see how..
The Earth having two ice caps is rare in its history. Having even one is unusual. We are therefore in an unusually cold period of Earth’s history.
I have to be honest, if this is ‘progress’ then it’s not very progressive. This is hilarious. Can you imagine what Khant would do if this were black cabs in London?
https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1705651803168366638
Texan Gold there Mogs.
Well if there is a climate emergency, it is not shown in the heat waves in the USA. Debunked by Steve Koonin and John Christy. Chapter 5 of Unsettled S Koonin -explains the trick to explain the scary looking graph in the Climate Science Special report from 2017.
The fact that Gray mentions James Lovelock in a positive way instantly tells you anything he says is going to be garbage. Lovelock was bonkers and only appeals to the Charles “I talk to plants” type of environmentalist. He one of the first people to claim that by some point this century the Arctic would be the only part of the Earth that would still be habitable. Why any media site is giving Gray any kind of a platform is beyond me.
Yes but Lovelock as he got older realised he was wrong and admitted so. He should at least be credited for that, because the current lot of eco socialist government funded data adjusters simply double down on their propaganda masquerading as science with no intention of ever admitting they are way off the mark.
I gave up reading Lovelock’s books/statements a long time ago. Did he say that there isn’t going to be runaway climate change, or did he just say he was wrong about how quickly it would happen?
“Charles “I talk to plants””. Always a good thing to talk to plants as you’re giving them CO2 (plant food) from your breath. Mind you in Charlie boy’s case there’s an awful amount of hot air.
JugEars has always been several sandwiches short of a picnic …. we’d be far better served with his sister at the helm.
As long as you don’t think the plants are talking back, or understand what you say.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66906201
Armed forces, suitably armed, to replace police who have handed in arms permits following the arrest of the officer after Chris Kaba killed.
It is difficult to know where to start with this jumble of mainly nonsense. The first thing I see is references to James Lovelock, but infact Lovelock actually said that he was WRONG about climate change. He said he thought he knew what was going to occur 30 years ago and even wrote books about it, but “it just hasn’t happened”. Gray then redeems himself a bit by criticising Net Zero and the lack of the technology required for it. But he quickly dives into more nonsense again by saying “There is a serious possibility that we are now in the early stages of runaway climate change”——–This is an evidence free statement. Then he doubles down on the nonsense with the following “Remember, most climate scientists agree that once human induced climate change is in the works it goes on for decades or even centuries. You can’t stop it” ———I have always liked the Daily Sceptic for the fact that we can all have a point of view. So my point of view on this article is that the author has jumped into a subject he knows little about. He has written a jumble of fictions with a few facts sprinkled on top.
I missed the facts.
Incidentally the nonsense was from John Gray – Richard was simply reporting what he said.
He did say Net Zero was nonsense. He did say we entered it before the technology for it was available and he did say that many of the raw materials for batteries etc were produced by China. So a few facts in amongst the evidence free nonsense.
How can you possibly describe this as excellent? It is utter rubbish. Gray accepts that humans are causing climate change and they might not be able to stop it. It talks about uncertainty about the climate initially but effectively he is saying the science if fixed and we are causing climate change. It is utter nonsense as many physicists point out and they are being slowly silenced because of it. Unherd is becoming a promoter of nonsense.
“John Gray questions the effectiveness of current climate policies, suggesting they were implemented prematurely and lacked the necessary technology and materials.”
The policies were designed by idiots to solve a non-existent problem, by replacing working existing technology with unworkable and non-existing technology based on the conceit that Mankind, not physics, controls the Universe and that a global coalition of vested interests can control the Earth’s hugely energetic heat budget by legislation, taxation, initiatives, fraud, grift, lies, wishing and Pagan Mother Earth worship.
“Remember, most climate scientists agree ….”. Oh pleeeease, not that old 97% of scientists agree rubbish? Yes, 97% of a small number of so-called scientists who are already sold on man-made warming.
100% of “climate scientists” agree that they like the funding.
Grey still seems to accept that they are required.