According to the US Department of Energy | COVID-19 probably leaked from a lab

New intelligence has prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental lab leak in China is most likely the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, though US spy agencies remain divided on the origins of the virus, US officials said on Sunday.

The finding is a shift from the department’s previous stance that it was undecided about how the virus emerged.

Some officials briefed on the information said it was relatively unconvincing and that the Department of Energy’s conclusion was made with “low confidence,” suggesting that its level of certainty was not high. Although the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed its findings, officials said.

Officials would not disclose the nature of this information. But most of the Energy Department’s information comes from the network of national laboratories it oversees, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy rings or communications intercepts.

Intelligence officials believe that examining the origins of the pandemic could be important to improving the global response to future health crises, although they warn that finding an answer on the origin of the virus could be difficult, if not impossible, given given China’s opposition to any further research. Scientists say it is their duty to explain how a pandemic started that has killed nearly 7 million people.

Knowing more about its origin could help researchers understand what poses the greatest threat to future outbreaks.

The new information and the evolution of the Department of Energy’s perspective was reported Sunday by the wall street journal.

“No definitive answer”

Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, declined to confirm this information. He said, however, that President Joe Biden had ordered that national laboratories be involved in efforts to determine the origin of the epidemic, so that the government uses “all the tools” at its disposal.

Besides the Department of Energy, the FBI has also concluded, with a low degree of confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese laboratory that worked on coronaviruses. Four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, also with low confidence, that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in October 2021.

According to Sullivan, these divisions remain.

“There are a variety of views in the intelligence community,” he said on the show. State of the Union from CNN on Sunday.

Sullivan said if more information comes to light, the administration will share it with Congress and the public. “But as of now, the intelligence community has not given a definitive answer to this question,” he said.

Intelligence community leaders are due to brief Congress on March 8-9 as part of the annual global threat hearings. Avril D. Haines, Director of National Intelligence, and other senior officials will most likely be asked about the continued investigation into the origins of the virus.

A subject of contention all the way to the Capitol

How the pandemic began has become a point of contention in intelligence reporting, and recent reports from Congress have not won unanimous support.

Many Republicans on Capitol Hill have said they believe the virus may have come from one of China’s research labs in Wuhan. A congressional subcommittee, created when Republicans took control of the House in January, has made examining the ‘lab leak theory’ a central focus of its work, and is expected to organize the first d a series of auditions in March. Democrats were less convinced, with some saying they believe in the natural causes explanation and others saying they are unsure whether enough information is emerging to make a conclusive decision.

Some scientists believe that current evidence, including genes for the virus, point to a large food and live animal market in Wuhan as the most likely place for the coronavirus to emerge.

Chinese authorities have repeatedly called the “leak from the lab” hypothesis an unscientific and politically motivated lie.

Early in the Biden administration, the president ordered intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of the pandemic, after criticizing a World Health Organization (WHO) report on the matter. While some elements had not been thoroughly reviewed by intelligence officials, the review ultimately did not result in any new consensus within the agencies.

No evidence it was a weapon

In its March 2021 report, the WHO said it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus accidentally emerged from a laboratory. But China named half of the scientists who wrote the report and exercised enormous control over it. American officials paid little heed to this work.

Intelligence agencies have said they do not believe there is any evidence that the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 was deliberately created as a bioweapon. But they said whether it appeared naturally, perhaps in a market in Wuhan, or accidentally escaped from a lab is a matter of legitimate debate.

Anthony Ruggiero, a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former member of the National Security Council responsible for biodefense issues during the Trump administration, said he believed China was “still hiding crucial information” about how from which the virus had appeared. He added that the lab leak theory should not be discounted.

“The origin of the COVID-19 pandemic through a lab leak is not and was not a conspiracy theory,” he said.