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href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/us-intelligence-prepares-for-big-lab-leak-reveal/">telegraph.co.uk</a>
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<h1 class="reader-title">US intelligence prepares for Covid ‘lab
leak’ reveal</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">By Samuel Lovett, Deputy
Editor of Global Health Security</div>
<div class="credits reader-credits">16 June 2023 • 4:18pm </div>
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<p>It’s showtime – and both lab leak enthusiasts and those
who believe in natural origins (the ‘zoonati’) are
nervous.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>It could be a huge moment, or a terrible anticlimax.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>It would not be the first time a pandemic had been
caused by a laboratory-related accident: the <a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/">1977-1979
Russian Flu pandemic</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>Public Law <a
href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/619/text">Number
118-2</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>“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:</strong></p>
<p><strong>1. “...activities performed by the Wuhan
Institute of Virology with or on behalf of the
People’s Liberation Army.”</strong></p>
<p><strong>Issue:</strong> 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”. </p>
<p><strong>Lab leakers</strong> 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.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>The Zoonati </strong>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.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>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.”</strong></p>
<p><strong>Issue: </strong>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 <em>The Sunday Times</em>, US spies also
say there is evidence the lab was working on a vaccine
before the pandemic started.</p>
<p><strong>Lab leakers </strong>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. </p>
<p><strong>The Zoonati </strong>remain sceptical. They
say a <a
href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3">wrap-up
of all the work the WIV conducted on coronaviruses</a>,
including a list of viruses, was submitted to <em>Nature</em>
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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>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.”</strong></p>
<p><strong>Issue: </strong>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.</p>
<p><strong>Lab leakers</strong> 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.<strong> </strong>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.</p>
<p><strong>The Zoonati </strong>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“We went to dinners together, lunches, we saw each
other outside of the lab,” Dr Anderson told Bloomberg in
an interview from 2021.</p>
<p>The virologist also confirmed to <em>The Telegraph</em>
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.</p>
<p>“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.” </p>
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