It’s showtime – and both lab leak enthusiasts and those who believe in natural origins (the ‘zoonati’) are nervous.
No later than Sunday, and perhaps sooner, America’s director of National Intelligence must, by law, “declassify” and make public all “information relating to the origins of Covid-19”.
It could be a huge moment, or a terrible anticlimax.
By the time the deadline is reached, it will have been 1,265 days since news of a “mystery pneumonia” first emerged from Wuhan – and for much of that time a small group of US intelligence officials have anonymously been briefing that the virus came from a lab.
It would not be the first time a pandemic had been caused by a laboratory-related accident: the 1977-1979 Russian Flu pandemic is widely thought to have been sparked by the accidental release of a virus used in a US flu vaccine that had not been fully deactivated.
Yet the off-the-record intelligence briefings have been characterised as unprofessional and unscientific by many, and in March this year, the US Congress unanimously passed a law demanding that all secret material the US holds on Covid’s origin be made public.
Public Law Number 118-2, which was passed on March 20, is short at just 418 words but is to the point and gives the intelligence officials little, if any, wriggle room to hold things back.
It is one of the few things that those on either side of the Covid origins debate have come together to agree on, albeit for very different reasons.
Those who think the virus emerged naturally have dubbed it a “put up or shut up” law. Lab leakers, on the other hand, see it as a means to lift the lid on an episode they believe the US government itself is partly responsible for as it part-funded the high security lab in Wuhan.
As the deadline for the release of the US intelligence looms, we list the three key areas on which Law Number 118-2 demands full disclosure.
“Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of National Intelligence shall declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19), including:
1. “…activities performed by the Wuhan Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army.”
Issue: The background briefings have alleged that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army was involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in creating a virus that leaked. As the Sunday Times reported, US intelligence sources believe the lab has engaged in “secret projects … on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017”.
Lab leakers rightly say this would be explosive if proven. In addition to the anonymous briefings, they point to already leaked – but heavily redacted – US cables, seemingly compiled by US analysts in Taiwan.
These make mention of “cyber evidence” of Chinese military involvement and “shadow labs” at the WIV. They also suggest China’s central government in Beijing knew of the outbreak of Covid-19 “earlier than they admit”.
The trouble with the cables is that they are so heavily redacted that only a few words and phrases are visible. Lab leakers will be hoping the full text bangs this virtual nail home.
The Zoonati say military links should not come as a surprise given there is hardly a high security lab anywhere in the world, including Porton Down in England, where the military do not have some involvement. They suspect the anonymous briefers have been “happily blurring shades of grey” in this respect and hope the unredacted evidence will bear this out.
2. Declassify any intelligence which shows “…coronavirus research or other related activities performed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to the outbreak of Covid-19.”
Issue: The background briefings would suggest there is intelligence to show scientists at the WIV were conducting undeclared “gain-of-function” research in 2019 that sought to combine different coronaviruses and make them more infectious in humans. According to The Sunday Times, US spies also say there is evidence the lab was working on a vaccine before the pandemic started.
Lab leakers will alight on any hard evidence of any undeclared work on coronaviruses in China as a smoking gun. Some hypothesise that WIV scientists, working hand-in-hand with the military, created a mutant virus as part of a covert weapons programme which was highly effective at infecting people. That virus, now known as Sars-CoV-2, was then accidentally leaked and started spreading in Wuhan in the autumn of 2019, they say.
The Zoonati remain sceptical. They say a wrap-up of all the work the WIV conducted on coronaviruses, including a list of viruses, was submitted to Nature in October 2019 and that there was nothing unusual about the research. Further, they say, nothing “obviously nefarious or weird” happened during the submission and review process, which ran to August 2020, to suggest the Chinese were hiding secret projects.
Others say that even if declassification were to prove that WIV scientists were conducting dangerous undeclared research, this would not explain the outbreak itself. “I’d be very surprised if it was all true, but let’s pretend that it is – I think it’s still going to be really complicated trying to understand how that fits into this body of evidence that does point towards zoonotic origin,” argues Dr Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada.
3. Declassify any intelligence which shows “…researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in autumn 2019, including for any such researcher: the researcher’s name; the researcher’s symptoms; the date of the onset of the researcher’s symptoms.”
Issue: Reports have long persisted that a group of scientists at the Wuhan lab fell with coronavirus-like symptoms and were hospitalised more than a month before the virus started to spread widely throughout Wuhan, the implication being they had become infected through a lab accident.
Lab leakers point to three scientists from the WIV who they say US intelligence believe fell ill and were hospitalised in October or November 2019. They are Yu Ping, Ben Hu and Yan Zhu, all of whom worked at the lab at the time. If US intelligence proves these researchers were struck down by a Covid-like disease and hospitalised in the October-November period it would provide compelling evidence of a lab accident, the leakers say.
The Zoonati don’t dispute that the trio worked at the lab but say they don’t believe they fell ill or were hospitalised. They say they know this because, among other things, they were working with them over the period in question and have talked to them since.
Dr Danielle Anderson, an Australian scientist, was on secondment at the Wuhan lab until November 2019, when Covid is thought to have started spreading in the city. At the time, none of her colleagues displayed any coronavirus-like symptoms, she says.
“We went to dinners together, lunches, we saw each other outside of the lab,” Dr Anderson told Bloomberg in an interview from 2021.
The virologist also confirmed to The Telegraph that she had attended a conference on the Nipah virus in Singapore, in December 2019, alongside Dr Zhengli Shi, the senior scientist at the Wuhan lab and “many other” researchers from the WIV. Colleagues say if there had been a leak and three of her juniors were ill she would not have been there.
“There was no chatter,” Dr Anderson said. “Scientists are gossipy and excited. There was nothing strange from my point of view going on at that point that would make you think something is going on here.”
