Covid lab leak: is conspiracy theory becoming concrete truth?

The contentious debate over the origins of the coronavirus took another turn over the weekend after a new report from the US Energy Department pointed to an accidental laboratory leak in China.

The shift in the department’s view came after a new classified intelligence report was provided to the White House and key members of Congress, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Its conclusions are supported by the FBI, which believes with “moderate confidence” that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses.

‘Once little more than a fringe theory’

The New York Times has reported that some officials briefed on the new intelligence contained in the Energy Department report said that it was “relatively weak” and that its conclusion was made with “low confidence”.

A low-confidence assessment “generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion”, said CNN.

Nevertheless the latest assessment “further adds to the divide in the US government over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began in China in 2019 as the result of a lab leak or whether it emerged naturally”, said the news network. “The various intelligence agencies have been split on the matter for years.”

Four other US intelligence agencies, including the National Intelligence Council, have maintained their belief that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission, probably via the large food and live animal market in Wuhan.

However, the Energy Department report “lends more attention to a belief that was once considered – and by some, still is – to be little more than a fringe theory”, said Forbes.

‘An asymmetrical debate’

“Most mass media have reported the lab-leak debate as a bitter debate between two groups of scientists,” said Slate. “In fact, the debate is asymmetrical. On the one side, the overwhelming weight of opinion among virologists, epidemiologists, evolutionary biologists, and other scientists with experience and expertise is that Covid reached humans directly from an animal host or hosts.”

Although a few such experts “have supported the lab-leak side”, added the magazine, the most prominent proponents of a lab-leak origin are those “who lack relevant expertise or experience”.

The New York Times argued that “how the pandemic began has become a divisive line of intelligence reporting, and recent congressional reports have not been bipartisan”. Many Republicans in Congress have been ramping up calls for a proper investigation into the lab-leak theory.

Unsurprisingly, Chinese authorities have repeatedly pushed back against claims that the virus came from a laboratory, calling the theory a lie that has no basis in science and is politically motivated.

In response to the latest Energy Department findings, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mao Ning, highlighted the “authoritative and scientific” conclusion reached after a 2021 field mission between Chinese and World Health Organization (WHO) experts, who determined the lab-leak hypothesis was “highly unlikely”. Yet the WHO mission has been widely criticised as lacking transparency.

“Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN. “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”

Sullivan said US President Joe Biden had directed the national laboratories, which are part of the Department of Energy, to be brought into the assessment to determine the origins of the outbreak.

“The lab-leak debate has raged for three years now, without reaching a universally accepted resolution,” said Slate. What is more “there may not be a conclusive answer for a while: It took 29 years to definitively identify the source of Ebola, 26 years for HIV/AIDS, and 15 years for SARS.”