Covid-19 most likely originated from Chinese lab leak, suggests US Energy Department
In a fresh development with the investigations related to the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States’ Energy Department has said the virus most likely arose from a laboratory in China. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise.
The department also oversees a network of US national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.
The development was notified via a classified intelligence report, which was recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The Energy Department was previously unsure about the origin of the virus. However, in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office, the report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin.
Meanwhile, according to the WSJ report, the people who read the classified report said the US Energy Department made its judgement with ‘low confidence’.
However, with its judgement, the department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying that the Covid-19 virus was likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of natural transmission, while two are undecided.
Earlier too, the FBI had concluded the coronavirus pandemic resulted from a lab leak in China in 2021. The agency still holds on to its view.
China enforced some of the world’s most draconian lockdowns, quarantines and travel restrictions and still faces questions about the origins of the virus that was first detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
Heavy-handed enforcement prompted rare anti-government protests and took a heavy toll on the world’s second-largest economy.
Wuhan is home to an array of laboratories, many of which were built or expanded as a result of China’s traumatic experience with the initial severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, epidemic beginning in 2002.
These laboratories include campuses of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, which produces vaccines.
An outbreak at a seafood market in Wuhan had initially been thought to be the source of the virus, but some scientists and Chinese public health officials now see it as an example of community spread, rather than the place where the first human infection occurred, the 2021 intelligence community report said.
CHINA’s STANCE
China, which has placed limits on investigations by the World Health Organisation, has disputed that the virus could have leaked from one of its labs and has suggested it emerged outside China.
Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens.
However, no confirmed animal source for Covid-19 was identified.
Meanwhile, the lack of an animal source, along with the fact that Wuhan is the center of China’s extensive coronavirus research, has led some scientists and US officials to argue that a lab leak is the best explanation for the pandemic’s beginning.
