Answers to COVID-19 Lab Leak Questions?

All U.S. intelligence on COVID-19 origins will be released this week. Here are the questions I'll be asking.

Where did you come from?

Over the weekend, The Sunday Times published an long article that articulated a narrative for how a COVID-19 lab leak may have occurred.

Investigators who scrutinised top-secret intercepted communications and scientific research believe Chinese scientists were running a covert project of dangerous experiments, which caused a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and started the Covid-19 outbreak.

The sources for the reporting are described as follows:

The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.

The Sunday Times did not share any of their sources. However, the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 — which passed unanimously in both the House and Senate on March 20 — requires that all U.S. intelligence on COVID-19 origins be released by no later than next weekend.

Below is the law in full. The specific requests found in Section 3 are worth noting and are consistent with the claims made in The Sunday Times article.

When the U.S. intelligence is released later this week, I’ll be looking to answer the following questions:

1. In 2019, did Chinese researchers perform risky research on dangerous viruses?

2. Specifically, did they insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses?

3. Also, did they conduct “serial passaging” to make viruses more virulent?

4. Was work on a COVID-19 vaccine ongoing at WIV prior to the outbreak of COVID-19?

5. Did WIV hold or conduct research on coronaviruses that have not been acknowledged?

6. What role(s) if any did U.S. funding have in such research?

7. What U.S. scientists were aware of or even collaborating with such research?

8. Was there secret research ongoing at WIV conducted by the Chinese military?

9. Did Zhou Yusen work for the Chinese military on coronaviruses and did he fall to his death from the roof of WIV?

10. Did researchers who worked on coronaviruses, and their family members, become ill in fall 2019 with COVID-19-like symptoms?

What questions would you add?

I do not have high expectations that there will be unimpeachable answers to any of these questions. However, seeing the specific intelligence that sits behind the narrative of a lab leak will be important for assessing the strength of the theory, even if remains mainly circumstantial.

In 2021 I wrote that the implications of a lab leak were so significant, would implicate governments — and perhaps scientists — in China and the US and would have consequences across the world for research on risky viruses that there might not be much stomach for identifying a lab leak as cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. I still think that is true. We may never know the origins of COVID-19.

But perhaps this week we will get a little closer to knowing the truth. I’ll follow up after the intelligence is released later this week. Stay tuned!

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