The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.
But the agency issued a new assessment this week, with analysts saying they now favor the lab theory. There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said.
How is anyone supposed to evaluate this? There's nothing new but they changed their minds anyway.
When I read a report from scientists about the origin of COVID, it's packed with evidence and argument. It might still be wrong, but at least it's transparent.
But when intel agencies do this, they just release a sentence or two and that's it. They don't even say if their conclusion is based on classified evidence that the rest of us haven't seen. But that's pretty important, no? After all, if their finding is based on the same public information available to everyone, then who cares what they think? Their analysts are certainly no better than the world's top virologists and epidemiologists. Their opinion only carries weight if it's based on stuff that's in their wheelhouse. That is, spy stuff. Signal intelligence. Human sources. Imagery. But if that's the case, we'll never see it and we're explicitly being asked to take their conclusions on faith.
And that's the problem. The incoming boss of the CIA has been very public about his belief in the lab leak theory. The agency says that had no impact: they wrote their assessment under the old regime. Maybe so. Then again, they'd say that regardless, wouldn't they? It's meaningless.
And none of us will ever get to see either their assessment or the evidence it's based on. Is it a rigorous review of all the evidence based on a foundation of deep scientific understanding? Or is it a sloppy broadside written by a bunch of naifs who never even engage with the scientific debate and just want avoid a fight with new boss?
We'll never know. But remember the aluminum tubes?
I have no clue on the origins of COVID: however, the fact that publicly discussing one, of the two potential sources of COVID, became taboo in the US is a bad thing.
What became bad was using one of the possible original sources of COVID as a reason to blame one country for causing it and somehow making that cause a reason for hating anyone who looked like they may have come from that country and thus giving license to physically attack people in the street.
This is a strawman. Only the left was talking about this. I want to know because I want to hold Fauci accountable. No, not throw him in jail. Just take him and the power that he held off the pedestal. And fix the problem that set this up in the first place.
If your doctor told you to stop hitting yourself in the face with a board would you do it?
So, Fauci released it himself? Or are you just an idiot? So many questions...
A straw man? I seem you've decided to ignore the very public nationalists and bigots who were using that very argument.
Taboo? Meaning uninformed people never shut up about it?
Lets be frank here, this is comically stupid.
The lab leak stories were flamed and spread to cast villainy and blame on foreigners. From his high perch, Adam wrinkles his nose at anyone who pushes back against this kind of awfulness.
Soon we will see similar self righteous idiots (probably the same people) casting stones and wrinkling their nose at anyone pushing back against the anti-immigrant measures (maybe they do have disease!) and the Civil rights reversals (maybe the constitution really doesn't grant rights and protections!) . Can't make people uncomfortable!
maroon
So you base your opinion of the origins of covid on ... the propaganda value of such origins to your enemies? Sound.
Anyway ... seems that "they started covid by eating weird animals in unsanitary conditions" would be the racist take.
Why would you not gauge the veracity of claims on whether it was being shouted by the boy who called yellow peril?
Sure, we need to check for wolves, but if that boy didn't learn his lesson...
Since he didn't say what you said he did, either a) you are incapable of parsing simple words and sentences, or b) you do know and you're a troll who doesn't give a damn if other people know you're a troll.
You are also being comically stupid here.
Interesting. I'm an emeritus medical school professor whose expertise is genetics and molecular biology. I was in the Moderna Phase III trial. I've followed the pandemic and the issue of origins from the beginning until today. If discussing either of the two potential sources was taboo, it was a breathtakingly ineffective taboo.
Joel - I appreciate that your knowledge on the topic FAR exceeds mine. Rather, I said "...publicly discussing one...."
Yes, lets be honest, there was public censorship (social media, TV etc) of the lab leak theory. In fact, the lab leak theory was called racist instead of 'a possible valid source/theory.'
Why is this important?
IF you except that the lab leak was valid source then:
- You might try to determine if anything else escaped the lab?
- How did the escape happen?
- What can be done different in the future etc?
Further, as a Democrat I want to believe in science. I believe that closing down discussion of the lab leak potential, was 100% political: it is similar to Republicans not believing in global warming, because they dislike the political implications of believing...
As I said, discussion was never shut down in my universe. I don't know where you live.
No, there was not censorship, which is the prevention by government of publication. The government didn’t require any media organization to submit content for review before publication, or threaten to shut any down for having published.
Also, I assume you meant ‘accept’, not ‘except’.
Noted, you didn't find any evidence for the lab leak theory, either, 'middle'.
Not very middle to be spouting right-wing talking points based upon a few people spouting racist epithets,
The universe you live in is not mine. Really, you should have learned long since that you're not going to be permitted to force a frame here. It's like you've stepped out of 1990's trolldom such as it was.
It did not, in fact, become taboo.
As far as I know, the two potential sources of covid are lab leak and natural origin. Both receive extensive discussion. Which potential source has discussion of become taboo?
Seems to me that as time passes the evidence for the zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 keeps getting stronger. Because of actions taken by the Chinese we'll probably never know for sure, but if I had to place a bet, my money is with science.
My money isn’t even with “science(tm),” it’s with the fact that every other pandemic in human history that I know of has had natural and often zoonotic origins.
Yep. And this one appears to be no different.
Makes sense.
By the same logic, current planetary increases in CO2 load and temperatures have natural causes. Glad that's settled!
Perhaps you see a flaw in that logic? Does the same flaw apply to your logic?
BTW, all pandemics, although originally of zoonotic origin were spread by technological humans. For example, the black plague, the various illnesses that decimated American Indians, etc.
There is absolutely no question that COVID19 is zoonotic. The question is whether it spread to humans in Wuhan, a thousand kilometers from where it most likely originated in the bar caves of Guangding and Guangxi due to poor hygiene in a Wuhan animal market, due to an accident with a natural sample at WIV, orb due to an experiment at WIV to enhance human infectiousness (ie serial passage) followed by an accident.
The frantic attempts by the Chinese authorities to withhold information and evidence strongly suggests that they believe it was one of the latter two explanations.
Weirdly, there's evidence for one and not for the other.
That's the difference.
With CO2 levels, we can actually measure the amount of CO2 in the air, over time. We can measure how much fossil fuel is being burned. We can measure the proportion of carbon isotopes in the air and compare it to surface sources and fossil sources.
So yeah, there's a big difference.
My bet is also with science, but what do you base your conclusion that with time the zoonotic origin is stronger?
IIRC, there was a recent discovery that one of the mutations that enabled the SARS-CoV-2 virus to cause a pandemic in humans, was observed in specimens found ‘in the wild’. Previously, that had not been seen, and the origin of the mutation had been unknown, leading to speculation that the mutation was lab-created.
You are way behind on all this.
1. Simplest lab leak explanation is that WIV was careless with one of its samples. In that case COVID would be a naturally occurring virus. So even finding a virus identical to COVID in the wild would not be evidence against the lab leak theory.
2. Second possibility is that COVID was created from a related natural virus through gain of function experiments, most likely serial passage. This would explain why WIV just happened to have a bat coronavirus that was remarkably infectious in humans when the many humans who encountered bats from Guangdong ave Guangxi bat caves never encountered such a virus. In this case discovering that some of the characteristics of COVID that made it so virulent also assist in the wild again means nothing. The natural progenitor virus might have had those characteristics or serial passage might have produced the same mutation a second time.
There's also no evidence of a lab ever finding a mutation like the one which spawned COVID 19.
The lab leak is not just missing evidence the Chinese government quashed, it's missing evidence in the spaces around that, too. The lab just never had any evidence of having the parts to make this specific disease. They'd have needed not only the one mutation not seen in the wild, but others which were, but never recorded as being sampled or tested there.
Saying that they wrote the assessment under the old regime may be true but nonetheless misleading. Did they write the assessment before they knew who was the nominee for CIA director? If so, they had plenty of time to release it before the new director was confirmed, so why didn't they? And did they have any contact with the nominee before they wrote the assessment? If so, what was the nature of that contact? Without answers to these questions, the suggestion that the circumstances show they were unbiased is worthless and in fact highly suspicious.
It seems too little time to produce a new assessment from scratch.
However, the decision to release it may have been driven by the Trump administration. Is that bad? Why shouldn't it be released? A better question is why the Biden adminstration did nor
There would always be competing drafts. Different opinions. You just drag one out and say 'this one' even if it doesn't, in fact, fit the facts. When facts don't mean anything and no one can check your homework...
It based on a new admin wanting the intelligence to fit what they believe in, not unlike the Bush II Administration.
+1
+1
+1
It also conveniently fits into this Shock and Awe plan they are running to keep people from focusing on the important stuff. Luckily it's already wearing thin and they are precipitously close to overplaying their hand. Hubris will get you every time. The financial engines don't like disruption, they can cripple this administration if they don't like it.
And how about the old regime? Biden wanted to protect Fauci. Fauci's protector has been dethroned.
LOL! Fauci's "protector" is science. This isn't "Game of Thrones."
+5
The CIA report, via WSJ:
From the WSJ reporting:
The issue is, you've unambiguously declined to keep an open mind about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, whereas all of the US agencies remain completely wide open to both sources.
"Completely wide open" implies one thinks a lab incident is equally probable as zoonotic spillover. That's simply at odds with the scientific consensus, to the extent one exists.
I think it would indeed be intellectually dishonest to claim we know marketplace-linked zoonotic spillover is what led to the pandemic (and consequently rule out a lab leak).
But it's just as intellectually dishonest to view the latter as being equally probable per the available science.
Needless to say, "US agencies" are hardly paragons of objectivity when it comes to the origins of Covid. Mind you that's completely understandable: For some years now Washington has considered China a strategic competitor, and has been fixated on the national security risks to the US emanating from that country. Still, one wouldn't go to Toyota to get objective information about Honda.
"That's simply at odds with the scientific consensus, to the extent one exists [on bluesky]."
Scientific consensus based on people whose careers depend on financial backing from Fauci? How about looking at the evidence yourself?
I've looked at the published evidence. There is no evidence for a lab origin. The null hypothesis is a natural (not lab) origin, and none of the published evidence falsifies the null hypothesis.
Well put.
Thank you.
+3
You really need to get over this obsession that Anthony Fauci secretly runs the entire world.
Are you under the impression that Anthony Fauci decides who gets grants? This kind of conspiracy theory is utterly detached from the real world of the scientists studying covid.
You probably think Fauci is Jewish right?
Is he? It would explain their weird fascination, I guess.
Throughout the pandemic, Fauci gave the country and the world the best advice he could based on the information available to him, and when more information became available his advice very properly changed accordingly. what, exactly, do you have against Fauci?
No, that's the scientific consensus, to the extent one exists, of virologists and epidemiologists in general.
This is a recent publication in Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
Amen
There is exactly one reason this report was released: tЯump.
Of course!!!!
What an AMAZING coincidence that this report was issued less than a week after the liar who spent years claiming the virus was created by China became president, and who is about to name RFK Jr, who spent years claiming that it was not only created by the Chinese, but designed to spare Jews!!!
And his new CIA Director is a hard-core Trump sycophant.
This is as obvious as the orange makeup on Trump's face.
I will continue to use Occam’s Razor for COVID-19, and use the simplest explanation. Every pandemic in human history (that I know of) has been caused by natural sources, and very often leaps from animals to humans, so without definitive evidence, I’m skeptical of the lab-leak theory. This sudden switch by the CIA doesn’t inspire any confidence in me that Occam’s Razor shouldn’t prevail.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC416634/
Well, read the above link and perhaps update your priors. We have several times been a dice-roll away from a pandemic starting as the result of a lab-leak.
Notice that in the example of the SARS lab-leak mentioned in the linked paper, the authorities were on the ball and able to trace and isolate close contacts. But in this case, there is evidence that the Wuhan government was ignoring the spread of the disease. So by the time the central government got involved, there was no possibility of containment.
Now there is nothing particularly unusual about a lab leak -- they have happened many, many times in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents
I'm not arguing that Covid was necessarily the result of a lab leak. I don't think that at this point we will ever know. But the reflexive hostility to this hypothesis reflects nothing more than mindless partisanship.
Amen. I still don't understand why libs reflexively take this position. Is it a loyalty to Fauci, who showed his disdain for Trump openly? I just don't get it. We should all want to find the answer to prevent this happening again.
It's true that Fauci looked a little uncomfortable when, after months of all kinds of other ignorant things misleading the public that Trump said related to COVID, he suggested on national TV some kind of disinfectant or shining an ultraviolet light inside a human body would be a really clever way to end COVID infections.
Fauci demonstrates way more self control through all that than I would have. I'm baffled about how right wingers turned him into some kind of criminal to the point where his life was theatened and he needed police protection which Donald of course ended immediately upon his return.
I don't take the position that a (direct) zoonotic origin should be accepted unless there's evidence to the contrary. I take the position that the epidemiological and genetic evidence strongly favors an origin at the wet market. That doesn't mean lab involvement is impossible, just that all (publicly available) evidence to date favors the market.
That's a zoonotic source, dude.
I know. Try reading for comprehension.
LOL! It's not reflexive hostility to alternative hypothesis, it's insistence that the burden of proof is on those asserting the lab leak to meet that burden.
Buttercup.
We've already had an instance of SARS spreading from a lab leak in China. See the above-linked pubmed article.
It is not far-fetched to assert that the thing that already happened once, happened again.
Also. I deeply & sincerely hope that you are not in fact a professor. Because your description of "null hypothesis" is just silly. Like, painfully silly.
Buttercup. We've already had an instance of SARS spreading from a lab leak in China.
Ahh, yes, patronizing insults. The hallmark of trenchantly reasoned argumentation. LOL.
We've already had an instance of SARS spreading from a lab leak in China. Buttercup.
Noted, you didn't support this assertion.
The spread (again, this was SARS-CoV-1, in 2004, two years after the initial, zoonotic outbreak which infected thousands) ultimately infected nine cases, one of which was fatal; the Chinese government reacted quickly and appropriately. Now, the political situation may have changed in the intervening years, such that the government which knew how to respond to a lab leak in 2004, failed to do so in 2019, but that would seem to require evidence and explanation. Wouldn’t the Wuhan authorities in 2019 have the same incentives as in 2004, to prevent further spread of infection from a (purported) leak? Wouldn’t it be easier and more certain, especially for an authoritarian government, to immediately quarantine the institute staff and nip an outbreak in the bud, than to dither, and hope to bury the evidence later?
The burden of proof is on you. You failed to meet it. You're exactly the sort of crank who won't shut up about 'Einstein was WRONG!' Ho hum, you're boring.
LOL! It's not reflexive hostility to alternative hypothesis, it's insistence that the burden of proof is on those asserting the lab leak to meet that burden.
Exactly.
Note that this was the original SARS-CoV-1 virus, not the SARS-CoV-2 that appeared in 2019. The outbreak occurred in the period 2002 - 2004 and was zoonotic in origin; the lab leaks came later and caused a handful of cases.
One news agency reported it was a "low confidence" finding, though others haven't reported it that way.
Note: the "lab leak" theory can be expanded to include most everything--to the point of being meaningless. There is no evidence that it was constructed in a lab, i.e. humans spliced in genes. Sequencing has been very useful. Two strains spread initially, both centered around the wet market--which was a much better gain of function lab than any virus institute.
I agree with you. It's framed as a motte-and-bailey argument, often.
This doesn't mean it's wrong but it makes me suspicious.
(When you point this m-&-b framing out, the purveyors claim you're straw-manning. They know.)
fyi: "low confidence" reported here:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jan/26/cia-now-backs-lab-leak-theory-to-explain-origins-of-covid-19
Even if it was not manufactured in a lab, even if it was collected in the mountains and brought back to the lab - isn't that worth knowing? And holding the lab responsible.
Sure. Bring the evidence. The burden of proof is on those asserting that it was due to a lab leak.
Of course, isn't that it was brought back to the lab. It's that a captured animal was brought to the market without the virus ever being in te lab.
If the CIA wants to promote a theory that is at odds with the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community (zoonotic spillover linked to a wet market), they're free to do that! Moreover, doing so is likely to be more in tune with the
agitpropthinking of the new regime.+1
If lab leak is proved can we get reparations from Chiner?
For the billionth time: the "lab leak" theory does NOT MEAN THE VIRUS WAS CREATED IN A LAB!!!
It was a naturally occurring BAT virus.
The "lab leak" theory is based on speculation that the BAT VIRUS was being STUDIED IN THE WUHAN LAB and that SOMEONE GOT INFECTED with it.
It was NOT CREATED IN THE LAB. IT WAS NOT A BIOWEAPON. IT WAS NOT ARTIFICIAL.
When the media reports on this, they NEED TO MAKE THIS CLEAR.
Should I say it again?
COVID-19 WAS NOT CREATED IN A LAB.
The Wuhan lab is a BST-4 facility. Look up what that means. The containment safeguards are overwhelming. All work is done in sealed cabinets kept under negative pressure. The likelihood that a worker got infected is infinitesimal.
Also, the early cases are almost all clustered around the market on the west side of the river. The lab is on the east side about 10 miles away. So one would have to posit not only that someone at the lab somehow overcame all the safeguards and got infected, but that he just happened to go to the market to spread it around three days later.
Thanks.
"... Look up what that means. .."
What something like that means in theory and what it means in practice are sometimes quite different.
Do you have any actual evidence that they didn't follow established practices? I've never seen any.
"Do you have any actual evidence that they didn't follow established practices? I've never seen any."
You apparently didn't look very hard. Googling quickly produced this Washington Post story :
"Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies
on coronaviruses from bats. .."
Also
"There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said. ..."
but that he just happened to go to the market to spread it around three days later.
And avoided infecting people on the east side. Quite a trick, that.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/
Mistakes happen. They've happened before. They will happen again. Even in high-security labs.
Article concerns a leak from a level-3 lab in Beijing; Wuhan had level-4 containment.
For the billionth time, all caps makes your argument look weaker, not more convincing.
The lab leak theory, as you point out, unfortunately is a hodgepodge of theories with no evidence. When each one has evidence against it, you move back to a different one, 'moving the goal posts'.
Where's your evidence they ever had that sample? There's none. Any evidence they had it spontaneously show up in the lab later? There's none.
One point that isn't emphasized enough is that the lab had systems in place to prevent accidental spread of the organisms being studied. The market, in contrast, had no controls whatsoever.
This is just the beginning of the Trump admin bullshitting the country. Lets not pretend it's anything more than that. Long 4 years coming. No need to bend over backwards and give them the benefit of the doubt. We know what's coming. Don't play into their hands.
WTF difference does it make anyway?
I can't believe anyone even thinks this, after the damage done by this virus. Newsome wants to know what we could have done to prevent the damage from the California fires, but we don't care about the disease that upended our world?
LOL! Your reading comprehension is obviously poor. It's not that nobody cares, it's that there is *no way to know.*
Covid mattered - learning how it could have fought better - but what the exact source of the virus doesn't matter in the least. It is in the past, new and possibly worse pandemics will appear in the future.
Because we know what we could do against it and the Current administration is right there dismantling and defenses.
You know, the same administration blaming it on a lab leak.
The CIA may have come out with this because it gives Trump a point of horseshit he can't back off of and so leaving him in conflict with China, and thereby less easy to just abandon Taiwan.
That's plausible. Trump seems to want US-Sino tensions to relax, and maybe even a deal of some kind. And that won't go down well in all corners of The Blob.
The evaluation finds psyops for America's war against China.
We know exactly what is going on.
"There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said."
Let me translate -- "Don't believe a word."
There is plenty of information transmitted here: we will obey and do thy bidding....
I don't understand why you think I'm lying. I SAID I wasn't lying. How is that not the end of this?
The clue is that the new report was writtenn in Sharpie. 🙂