Government Agencies on the Source of the Covid 19 Virus

 

John Ratcliffe, new CIA Director

Julian E. Barnes reports in a New York Times piece of January 25, 2025 on the status of the debate in the intelligence community over the origins of the Covid 19 virus.  He reports that after years of asserting that insufficient information is available to draw conclusions the latest CIA assessment leans towards the "Lableak" theory as opposed to the theory that the virus originated naturally in a Wuhan animal market.

Citing "a senior intelligence official" Barnes reports that in the final weeks of the Biden administration Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, ordered a classified review of the pandemic's origins.  He instructed the analysts to take a position one way or the other.  It is this assessment that concluded that the virus somehow escaped one of the secure laboratories in Wuhan.  Ratcliffe who has long supported the Lableak theory made the decision to declassify the assessment.  The analysts' report says that the assessment is made with "low confidence" meaning that it is based on fragmentary and incomplete intelligence. Citing "intelligence officials" Barnes says that the assessment is not based on new intelligence but the result of reexamination of the same intelligence that has long been available.

Barnes says that "five agencies including the National Intelligence Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency assessed that natural exposure most likely caused the epidemic." But that assessment was also made with low confidence.

Barnes also says the two agencies, the FBI and the Department of Energy, assessed a lab leak origin, but they disagree on which lab was the source of the leak.

Perhaps the crux of the matter is in the following that Barnes summarizes from conversations with senior Biden administration officials responsible for the new analysis:

These officials say that there are powerful logical arguments for both the lab leak and the natural causes theories, but that there simply is no decisive piece of intelligence on either side of the issue.

To boost the natural origins theory, intelligence officers would like to find the animal that passed it to a human or find a bat carrying what was the likely ancestor of the coronavirus that causes Covid.

Similarly, to seal the lab leak, the intelligence community would like to find evidence that one of the labs in Wuhan was working on a progenitor virus that directly led to the epidemic.

Neither piece of evidence has been found.

In principle decisive evidence might be found in files hidden in one of the Wuhan labs, but finding such a thing would challenge even a very aggressive CIA.  Barnes reports the "senior Biden administration officials" think if the problem is ever resolved it will be through a scientific breakthrough rather than an intelligence coupe.

While the pandemic could be a dramatic example of chemistry gone badly awry, Barnes reporting makes the assertion that science, implicitly chemical science, is the key to finding what went wrong.  In that sense it strengthens the notion that chemistry can do good or ill depending on how we use it.  That is, of course, the realistic and ultimately positive view we would like to see encouraged.