A Big Week for the “Lab Leak”: Making Sense of the Latest Twists in the COVID-19 Origins Debate

There’s no guarantee that the events of the past few weeks will change Democrats’ calculus, but yesterday Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer appeared to acknowledge that the possibility of a so-called lab leak deserves to be taken seriously. “The bottom line is we’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” the Journal quoted Schumer as saying. “The Biden administration is committed to it. They have all kinds of people looking at it, and we’ll wait to see their results.” A Schumer spokesman would not say whether the senator now supports a bipartisan inquiry. 

For now, the outstanding questions far outnumber the answers. There is fragmentary and circumstantial evidence supporting two credible but dueling hypotheses: one, that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spilled over to humans from an infected animal at the wet market in Wuhan where the disease first exploded into view; or two, that the virus originated in a nearby laboratory in Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was known to pursue risky coronavirus research, is roughly eight miles from the market. Even closer sits the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which also operates laboratories.

The World Health Organization, which has been largely stonewalled by China in its efforts to probe the pandemic’s origin, contends that both hypotheses remain on the table.

China has long denied that COVID-19 originated from a Wuhan laboratory, or even within its borders. On Monday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said at a press briefing, “The origin of the novel coronavirus is a scientific issue and should not be politicized.” 

As of last night, it was not clear what new intelligence led the Department of Energy to change its assessment. That information, which remains classified, was reportedly shared with other intelligence agencies, which did not alter their assessments.

But the shift by the Department of Energy is notable, as it funds and oversees a network of 17 national laboratories, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which possesses advanced national security capabilities.  Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Trump, says that both the Energy Department and the FBI have a “huge scientific workforce,” making their assessments of a lab origin significant.

Others are reserving judgment until more details emerge. “It’s very difficult to say anything until we see what information drove this updated analysis,” says Stephen Goldstein, a post-doctoral research associate in evolutionary virology at the University of Utah who coauthored an influential research paper linking COVID-19’s origin to the wet market. The Energy Department “showed it to other agencies and they did not change their assessments, and it’s low confidence,” Goldstein adds. “If the data exists and is declassified and I can update my own analysis, wonderful.”

In May 2021, President Biden ordered the US intelligence community, including the FBI, CIA, and offices at the Departments of State and Energy, to conduct a 90-day review of the origins question. A declassified account of their findings reflected broad consensus on several key points: that SARS-CoV-2 likely first appeared in Wuhan no later than November 2019, that it emerged without the foreknowledge of China’s government, and that it was not developed as a bioweapon. Most agencies also agreed that the virus “probably was not genetically engineered,” though two agencies believed they did not have enough evidence to make a determination.