SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen that leads to COVID-19, was not developed as a biological weapon, the U.S. intelligence community said after a 90-day investigation into the disease’s origins.
Since the first case of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, near the end of 2019, the world has demanded answers for its possible origins.
Among those theorised in public is the infamous “lab leak theory,” which claims that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a laboratory in Wuhan.
Former President Donald Trump was among the earliest public figures to wonder if the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese laboratory. In April 2020, he promised “a very thorough examination” of the possibility, and later in September, he urged the United Nations (UN) to hold China accountable for having “unleashed this plague onto the world.”
At the time, the idea was largely rejected by scientists and was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. It was also considered political rhetoric because of Trump’s repeated use of phrases such as “Chinese virus,” “Wuhan virus,” “kung flu” and others in reference to COVID-19, which some have blamed for the rise in reports of anti-Asian incidents.
It was not until May, after President Joe Biden ordered a closer review of COVID-19’s origins when the lab leak theory gained prominence as a legitimate possibility. He said the intelligence community has called it one of “two likely scenarios,” the other being human contact from an infected animal, also known as natural exposure.
Biden’s order required the intelligence community to report back in 90 days with a more definitive conclusion. On Friday, Aug. 27, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released an unclassified report of the community’s findings.
The community, which consists of 18 intelligence agencies, was divided on the origin of COVID-19. However, they still recognised the plausibility of the same two scenarios: natural exposure and lab-associated incident.
Four agencies, as well as the National Intelligence Council, had “low confidence” that the virus originated in nature, while one agency had “moderate confidence” that it came from a lab incident. Analysts from three other agencies were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information.
While the community was unable to trace a true origin, they found that the virus “was not developed as a biological weapon”. They also assessed that Chinese officials “did not have foreknowledge of the virus” before the initial outbreak of COVID-19.
