WASHINGTON: A crucial question has eluded governments and health agencies around the world since the COVID-19 pandemic began: Did the virus originate in animals or leak from a Chinese
Now, the US Department of Energy has assessed with “low confidence” in that it began with a lab leak, according to a person familiar with the report who was not authorized to discuss it. The report has not been made public.“There is not a consensus right now in the US government about exactly how COVID-19 started,” John Kirby, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said Monday . “There is just not an intelligence community consensus.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, said she was not sure what new intelligence the agencies had, but “it’s reasonable to infer” it relates to activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. She said a 2018 research proposal co-authored by scientists there and their US collaborators “essentially described a blueprint for COVID-like viruses”.
In a 2021 research paper in the journal Cell, scientists said the COVID-19 virus, is the ninth documented coronavirus to infect humans - and all the previous ones originated in animals. He said the fact that others in the intelligence community looked at the same information as the DOE and “it apparently didn't move the needle speaks volumes”. He said he takes such intelligence assessments with a grain of salt because he does not think the people making them “have the scientific expertise ... to really understand the most important evidence that they need to understand”.
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