US report on Corona origin: the laboratory orthosis remains a thesis

The result of the intelligence report is not the end of the discussion about the origin of the coronavirus.

As reported by the Washington Post, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines presented the report to President Joe Biden on Tuesday, which he had requested within 90 days in May.

Although it is still classified, the newspaper reported that there was no clear answer to the question of whether the virus, first detected in China, was naturally transmitted to humans through animals or was from a laboratory and was transmitted in an accident.

Majid Sattar

Political correspondent for North America based in Washington.

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The newspaper cited two government officials who were familiar with the matter.

There was no consensus among the members of the intelligence services who report to Haines.

This was exactly the reason for the investigation.

In May, Biden had received a report from the services that the search for the origin of the pandemic focused on two scenarios.

Also in the face of a heated debate in Congress, the President made public at the time that two services tended to assume that transmission to humans was due to contact with an infected animal, whereas one service tended to believe that there was a presumed laboratory accident Institute of Virology in Wuhan.

Biden's break with his own line

Since the government in Beijing made it clear at the time that it would no longer participate in the investigations by the World Health Agency, Biden Haines commissioned the report. That was a break with his previous line. Biden had until then denied the need for an investigation of his own. The WHO, which initially described the laboratory orthosis as "extremely unlikely", is the right place for it. Now the president relied on his own intelligence services and demanded a "completely transparent process" from Beijing.

However, China did not grant this. The Wall Street Journal quoted a government official as saying that although one is deeply immersed in the matter, if China does not grant access to certain data, one will never be able to correctly determine the origin of the virus. Intelligence Director Haines probably didn't expect anything else from Beijing. She said in June: They hope to find the "smoking gun". But it is a challenge and you may not solve the riddle. According to the Washington Post, parts of the report that has now been submitted could be released in the coming days. Biden had promised the services would brief Congress.

This brings the issue back to the domestic arena. There was the coronavirus, which some Republicans called Biden's actual “running mate” in the 2020 election campaign, from the start. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Democrat had sharply criticized China for not allowing access to American experts from the Centers of Disease Control, but he had always rejected Donald Trump's talk of the “China virus” and the “kung flu”. In January of this year, shortly before Trump moved out of the White House, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had published a paper with which he sought to reinforce the laboratory orthosis. It said the government had reason to believe that several researchers from the Wuhan Institute fell ill in the fall of 2019 and developed symptoms similar to Covid-19 and other seasonal diseases.

The Wall Street Journal later reported that the information in the Pompeo paper was based on intelligence. The assumption was that it was the service that tended towards the laboratory thesis in the May report. However, it was pointed out at the time that the findings only supported the thesis with low to medium certainty - in China people go to hospital for routine examinations or for harmless illnesses. At the same time, scientists now also demanded a detailed investigation. In a letter published in Science magazine in May, 18 scientists called for further investigation into the origin of the coronavirus, including laboratory theory.

In Congress, on the other hand, on the basis of the Pompeo paper, some Republicans not only accused China of covering up, but also suggested that Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical adviser, and his National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases were involved in the matter. In a hearing on Capitol Hill, Rand Paul, the libertarian-conservative Senator from Kentucky, asked Fauci whether his institute was still funding “gain-of-function” research in Wuhan.

Fauci rejected this: The “National Institutes of Health”, to which his institute belongs, would never have co-financed this mutation research in Wuhan. The MP Michael McCaul, chairman of the Republicans in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, is persistent: all roads led to Wuhan. It is the "largest cover-up in human history," he said recently.