EE. UU. no intelligence agencies have been able to determine whether researchers at the Wuhan, China, lab who fell ill in the fall of 2019 became inflamed with the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the disease that has spread around the world, according to a declassified report released Friday.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has revealed the main points about scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in 2019 before the first documented COVID-19 illnesses, as well as coronavirus studies conducted in the laboratory through China’s People’s Liberation Army. However, none of the published data definitively indicated that laboratory tests are the cause of the pandemic, which has caused nearly 7 million deaths.
The report comes months after President Biden signed a bill that called for the declassification of data similar to the pandemic’s possible links to the lab. That probably wouldn’t do much to resolve the hard-fought debate over the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an issue already a source of partisan bickering and investigations.
It’s also far from having the final say on how the pandemic began. Intelligence officials said it was still key data from China.
“When President Biden signed the COVID-19 Origin Act, he directed the intelligence network to use any and all tools at its disposal to investigate the origin of COVID-19,” White House National Security Council spokesman Adam Hodge said in an emailed statement. “The release of this report reflects this commitment to declassify and share as much data as possible about the origins of COVID-19, while protecting resources and methods. “
The United States had issued similar reports earlier and “the search for the origins of COVID-19 is a clinical matter and should not be politicized,” said Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington.
“The United States should avoid repeating the ‘lab leak’ narrative, avoid smearing China, and avoid politicizing origin factor tracing,” Liu said in a statement. Experts from the joint World Health Organization and China project have authoritatively concluded that a laboratory origin The pandemic is thought to be incredibly unlikely, he said.
The new report builds on previous findings, adding a January 2021 State Department report that reported that the U. S. government was not able to do so. The U. S. Department of Health had an explanation for why several researchers in the Wuhan lab became ill in 2019 with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 and non-unusual seasonal illnesses.
The ODNI report said there is no indication that the researchers have been hospitalized due to COVID-19, and that the intelligence network could simply check whether any of the researchers had treated live virus before becoming ill.
The report acknowledges that Wuhan researchers collaborated with the People’s Liberation Army on public fitness studies that included coronaviruses, and vaccines and remedies for those viruses, although there are no known studies that may have led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, as the pandemic virus is officially known.
Some scientists at the Wuhan institute have genetically changed coronaviruses, which is not an unusual laboratory practice, the report said, adding that it is not aware of any virus manipulations that may have caused SARS-CoV-2.
The report also noted safety and security issues at the institute that could have increased the risk of accidental exposure to viruses. The intelligence network said it was not aware of an express biosecurity incident that could have triggered the pandemic.
To date, the U. S. intelligence networkHe has shared some main points about the data he has accumulated since the pandemic began.
Last year, agencies concluded that two scenarios were plausible: the virus originated in animals and spread to humans, or that it originated from an incident at a Wuhan lab. Despite the war of words between the agencies over the maximum probable maximum hypothesis, the intelligence network agreed. that COVID-19 did not deliberately evolve as a biological weapon.
Both the FBI and the Department of Energy have stated, with a low to moderate level of confidence, that the laboratory leak theory is possible. This remains a minority view, and is more likely to result in maximum human exposure of other equipment to an inflamed animal.
The report also states that most, though not all, intelligence agencies have ruled out that COVID-19 has changed or adapted genetically in the lab.
With that of Madison Muller.
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