What really caused Covid?
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talkpolitics"We want to know what led to this so we can hopefully try and prevent something like this from happening in the future."
These words by Dr. David Relman, an infectious disease expert and microbiologist at Stanford University, pretty much sum up the overall conversation surrounding the origins of COVID-19 in 2021. Did come from a lab? Was it an inter-species transfer? Or maybe something else? Surely in time the answer will become clearer, right?
But now, 3 years after the start of the pandemic which still disrupts our daily lives, the US is only adding more uncertainty about what really happened in Wuhan in late 2019. The Department has assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a lab leak in China:
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/united-states/covid19-most-likely-caused-by-a-laboratory-leak-says-united-states-energy-department-in-shocking-new-report/news-story/657846c69334b91bec31de96ae88a51d
Still, at least two sources have said the Department has concluded in this intelligence report that there was "low probability" that the Coronavirus accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. The thing is, intelligence agencies may make low, medium, or high probability assessments; and a low confidence rating usually means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a firmer analytical judgment, or that there is not enough information available to make a firmer conclusion.
Right now the intelligence community seems to be hopelessly divided on the issue, and President Biden has committed resources to getting to the bottom of the origin question. The truth may look a bit closer than it was a couple of years ago but there's still a long way to go.
In 2021, the intelligence community declassified a report that showed 4 agencies gave a low confidence rating to the hypothesis that the virus may have jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild. In comparison the rating is of medium confidence that the pandemic resulted from a laboratory accident.
So the Department of Energy now says COVID-19 likely originated with a lab leak. In June 2021, Katherine Eban investigated the question of Covid's origins and discovered that toxic politics and hidden agendas may have obscured the truth right from the start:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
For much of 2020, proponents of the lab leak theory had to fight off claims that they were being xenophobic or racist — thanks in part to the anti-China rhetoric of then-President Donald Trump, who readily embraced the theory. An investigation launched by Trump's Department of State that sought to examine whether China's biological weapons program may have had a larger role in the origin of the Wuhan pandemic was shut down early as Biden's administration stepped in.
A letter from public health experts published in February 2020 in The Lancet, an influential scientific journal, also concluded qiute early that the virus had a natural origin. But the lab incident theory has gained traction over time, especially after reports that the intelligence community had found evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen seriously ill with a mysterious virus as early as November 2019 - though it's unclear whether they contracted COVID-19, and no further evidence has emerged to support this report.
By July 2021, senior Biden administration officials overseeing intelligence on the Covid origins believed that the lab leak theory was at least as credible as the possibility that the virus had occurred naturally in the wild. A dramatic shift from a year earlier when Democrats publicly downplayed such an idea:
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/united-states/covid19-most-likely-caused-by-a-laboratory-leak-says-united-states-energy-department-in-shocking-new-report/news-story/657846c69334b91bec31de96ae88a51d
The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill pushed for further investigation into the theory while accusing the Biden administration of downplaying its possibility.
The Speaker of the House of Foreign Affairs, Michael McCall, said he was "pleased" that the Department of Energy had "finally come to the same conclusion that I had already come to". (The Texas Republican released a 2021 report that concluded the “preponderance of evidence” showed the pandemic originated from a Wuhan lab leak.)
"Now is the time for the entire Biden administration to join the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the vast majority of Americans in publicly concluding what common sense told us at the beginning - the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a laboratory in Wuhan in China," McCall said in a statement.
So where does that leave us? Not far from where we started, really. Previous pandemics have arisen from natural transmission through animals, and it often takes months or years to discover the host through which the virus passed as it adapted to infect humans. In some cases, as with Ebola, the original natural source has never been identified.
So why does it matter where COVID-19 comes from? Well, to start with, finding the answer could help prevent the next pandemic in the first place. If that's not important enough, how about actual disclosure to the public. This has to be settled once and for all, otherwise trust in government is bound to erode further.
These words by Dr. David Relman, an infectious disease expert and microbiologist at Stanford University, pretty much sum up the overall conversation surrounding the origins of COVID-19 in 2021. Did come from a lab? Was it an inter-species transfer? Or maybe something else? Surely in time the answer will become clearer, right?
But now, 3 years after the start of the pandemic which still disrupts our daily lives, the US is only adding more uncertainty about what really happened in Wuhan in late 2019. The Department has assessed that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a lab leak in China:
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/united-states/covid19-most-likely-caused-by-a-laboratory-leak-says-united-states-energy-department-in-shocking-new-report/news-story/657846c69334b91bec31de96ae88a51d
Still, at least two sources have said the Department has concluded in this intelligence report that there was "low probability" that the Coronavirus accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan. The thing is, intelligence agencies may make low, medium, or high probability assessments; and a low confidence rating usually means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a firmer analytical judgment, or that there is not enough information available to make a firmer conclusion.
Right now the intelligence community seems to be hopelessly divided on the issue, and President Biden has committed resources to getting to the bottom of the origin question. The truth may look a bit closer than it was a couple of years ago but there's still a long way to go.
In 2021, the intelligence community declassified a report that showed 4 agencies gave a low confidence rating to the hypothesis that the virus may have jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild. In comparison the rating is of medium confidence that the pandemic resulted from a laboratory accident.
So the Department of Energy now says COVID-19 likely originated with a lab leak. In June 2021, Katherine Eban investigated the question of Covid's origins and discovered that toxic politics and hidden agendas may have obscured the truth right from the start:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
For much of 2020, proponents of the lab leak theory had to fight off claims that they were being xenophobic or racist — thanks in part to the anti-China rhetoric of then-President Donald Trump, who readily embraced the theory. An investigation launched by Trump's Department of State that sought to examine whether China's biological weapons program may have had a larger role in the origin of the Wuhan pandemic was shut down early as Biden's administration stepped in.
A letter from public health experts published in February 2020 in The Lancet, an influential scientific journal, also concluded qiute early that the virus had a natural origin. But the lab incident theory has gained traction over time, especially after reports that the intelligence community had found evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen seriously ill with a mysterious virus as early as November 2019 - though it's unclear whether they contracted COVID-19, and no further evidence has emerged to support this report.
By July 2021, senior Biden administration officials overseeing intelligence on the Covid origins believed that the lab leak theory was at least as credible as the possibility that the virus had occurred naturally in the wild. A dramatic shift from a year earlier when Democrats publicly downplayed such an idea:
https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/united-states/covid19-most-likely-caused-by-a-laboratory-leak-says-united-states-energy-department-in-shocking-new-report/news-story/657846c69334b91bec31de96ae88a51d
The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill pushed for further investigation into the theory while accusing the Biden administration of downplaying its possibility.
The Speaker of the House of Foreign Affairs, Michael McCall, said he was "pleased" that the Department of Energy had "finally come to the same conclusion that I had already come to". (The Texas Republican released a 2021 report that concluded the “preponderance of evidence” showed the pandemic originated from a Wuhan lab leak.)
"Now is the time for the entire Biden administration to join the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the vast majority of Americans in publicly concluding what common sense told us at the beginning - the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a laboratory in Wuhan in China," McCall said in a statement.
So where does that leave us? Not far from where we started, really. Previous pandemics have arisen from natural transmission through animals, and it often takes months or years to discover the host through which the virus passed as it adapted to infect humans. In some cases, as with Ebola, the original natural source has never been identified.
So why does it matter where COVID-19 comes from? Well, to start with, finding the answer could help prevent the next pandemic in the first place. If that's not important enough, how about actual disclosure to the public. This has to be settled once and for all, otherwise trust in government is bound to erode further.
