[D66] US intelligence prepares for Covid ‘lab leak’ reveal

[René Oudeweg]

telegraph.co.uk 
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/us-intelligence-prepares-for-big-lab-leak-reveal/> 



  US intelligence prepares for Covid ‘lab leak’ reveal

By Samuel Lovett, Deputy Editor of Global Health Security
16 June 2023 • 4:18pm
8–10 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

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 
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/> 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 
<https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text>, 
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 
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3>, 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.”

/*
*//**/ <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/>
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