Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy—one of several government agencies that have looked into how sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, first emerged—has come to believe that the pathogen probably escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The department, which was previously undecided on the matter, reportedly changed its position in light of fresh intelligence, but it issued its determination with “low confidence.” In doing so, it joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in favoring to some degree the lab-leak theory over the view that the virus has a zoonotic origin, leaping from animals to humans, perhaps in a Wuhan wet market. According to the Journal, the new information, which is in a classified report, but was reviewed by other members of the intelligence community, did not lead others to update their conclusions: four intelligence agencies, as well as the National Intelligence Council, still believe, also with “low confidence,” that natural transmission was responsible, and two remain undecided. (None think that China intentionally created the virus as a bioweapon.) Reviewing the totality of available evidence on the origins of a virus that by some estimates has killed twenty million people worldwide, the American intelligence community has reached a judgment that falls somewhere between not sure and who knows.
That uncertainty hasn’t stopped conservative politicians and commentators from declaring victory. “Lab leak theory appears vindicated,” Fox News reported. “So the government caught up to what Real America knew all along,” the Republican congressman Jim Jordan tweeted. “The same people who shamed us, canceled us, & wanted to put us in jail . . . are starting to say what we said all along,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted, shortly after. Reading these takes, you might be forgiven for overlooking the fact that much of the intelligence community still favors the natural-origin story, and that essentially no agency is confident in its assessment. “The bottom line remains the same,” an official told the Washington Post. “Basically no one really knows.” Leaders of the intelligence community are set to brief Congress next week. (The Energy Department declined to discuss details of the report with the Journal, and the F.B.I. did not comment.)
The covid-origin debate contains many of the elements that have dogged public discourse throughout the pandemic: confirmation bias, political polarization, geopolitical tensions, and the hazards of moderating online speech. In February, 2020, the Republican senator Tom Cotton became one of the first high-profile politicians to suggest that the novel coronavirus could have spilled not out of a wet market but from a research laboratory. He did so without evidence, but cited a paper by Chinese scientists that found that many of the first coronavirus cases couldn’t be linked to the market in question. Cotton’s comments arrived in a charged political milieu, as President Donald Trump took to calling the virus the “kung flu” and the “China virus,” and an international group of scientists published an open letter in The Lancet, condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Some social-media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, flagged or removed posts that suggested that the virus was man-made or engineered, driving conservatives to claim censorship. (Facebook stopped taking down those posts in May, 2021; Twitter announced it would stop enforcing its virus-misinformation policy last November.) In March, 2021, a report by the World Health Organization released the findings of its review, which deemed the lab-leak hypothesis “extremely unlikely.” But China had appointed many of the scientists who worked on that report and stonewalled a thorough and transparent investigation. Beijing has since dismissed discussion of the virus having escaped from a lab as “a lie created by forces against China.” (The government did not respond to the Journal’s requests for comment.)
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