There is no hard evidence that the corona pandemic was caused by a laboratory accident. That’s the conclusion again a long-awaited report of the joint US intelligence services, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). The 10-page executive summary was released late Friday night, almost a week after the deadline for releasing this information passed.
The report specifically addresses the relationship the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) may have had with the onset of the corona pandemic. It investigates whether the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was developed in Chinese laboratories as a biological weapon, but ultimately all US intelligence services conclude that this was not the case. Almost all services think that SARS-CoV-2 is not genetically modified. And most see no evidence that the virus has been further cultured in the lab that could have made it more dangerous.
The report is emphatically not an analysis of whether the pandemic started with a laboratory accident or through a natural transmission of the new virus from a wild animal to a human. Three years later, U.S. intelligence still finds both scenarios “plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection,” the summary said.
In a nutshell, the now released report contains no new facts. The executive summary is public, the full report (called the “annex”) will be shared only with members of Congress. The contents of the annex remain secret in order to protect sources and not expose the research methods. But, the ODNI assures, the information in the summary is “consistent” with the annex.
The question is whether US President Joe Biden is sufficiently meeting Congress’s demand to disclose all classified information that has been collected about a possible lableak as the cause of the pandemic. The Democrats and Republicans legislated on March 20 that the information had to be on the table within three months. Last Sunday, June 18, the deadline expired.
Leaked information
Expectations about the details in the report were high after the US newsletter Public one and a half week ago claimed to have about leaked information from US security advisers. In doing so, it mentioned three names of Chinese scientists from the WIV who would have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 as early as November 2019. They may well have been ‘patient zero’, bringing the infection from the lab into society. At the end of December 2019, the outbreak was first officially detected among residents of Wuhan.
The Wall Street Journal published earlier this week an article in which the paper claimed to have obtained independent confirmation of the early infection from the same three Chinese researchers: Hu Ben, Yu Ping and Zhu Yan.
Read also: The laboratory in Wuhan where corona started – or not
However, the ODNI report notes that WIV employees were ill in the autumn of 2019, but also that there are ‘no indications’ that these researchers ended up in hospital with covid-like symptoms. She also refers to the blood test that the Chinese government had done among all lab employees in early 2020, which revealed no infections. Names of researchers with symptoms of disease are missing.
In a news article in the scientific journal Science released on Friday, Ben Hu is responding for the first time to stories about his alleged involvement in the start of the pandemic. The allegations, he says, are no more than “rumours” and, moreover, “ridiculous”. Hu denies having been ill in the fall of 2019 and did not have any covid-like symptoms at that time, he writes. His colleague Yu calls the allegations opposite Science “fake news” and also denies that he was ill at the time. The third scientist, Zhu, did not respond to email inquiries.
Laboratory safety
While the US report again provides no evidence of a possible lableak as the cause of the pandemic, it does confirm previous suggestions that lab safety at the IPH left much to be desired. This increases the risk of accidental contamination. The report finds that in January 2019, WIV researchers were working with SARS-like coronaviruses under BSL2 conditions, while it had been known since 2017 that these types of viruses can also infect humans and were warned in early 2019 that this was potentially dangerous. But nothing is known about biosecurity incidents at the WIV in 2019.
The virologists in Wuhan had the knowledge to make difficult-to-detect genetic changes in the genetic material of the virus. But there is no indication that such genetic manipulation was also done with a closely related precursor to SARS-CoV-2 or that a coronavirus has been used as a backbone to construct SARS-CoV-2.
Military researchers from the Chinese People’s Army (PLA) had access to the WIV and conducted virological and vaccine research there. Again, there is no evidence that China was already working on a specific vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 before the outbreak of the pandemic.
The report only includes information about the ins and outs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Although that is by far the largest institute in Wuhan that worked with coronaviruses, it is not the only one. For example, there is also a laboratory of the Chinese regional infectious disease control and prevention (Wuhan CDC) that also worked with coronaviruses.