[26 March 2023] Earlier this month, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray said during a television interview that COVID-19 “most likely” originated from a Chinese government laboratory. “For quite some time now”, said Wray, the FBI has “assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan”. Wuhan, a city in central China, hosts the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which includes laboratories that specialize on biosecurity and the study of newly emerging infectious diseases. Wray added that Beijing has “been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work” of the United States in trying to determine the precise origins of the virus.
The view that the COVID-19 virus originated in a Chinese government laboratory is by no means commonplace. The view that COVID-19 was deliberately weaponized by a state entity is even less common. In fact, leading scientists have long argued that such views are not supported by the available scientific evidence. This is clear from numerous analyses of the genomes of the virus, as well as examinations of its nucleic acids sequence that is responsible for attaching to cells. None of these analyses shows any evidence of human design or any other form of weaponization. If anything, they indicate that COVID-19 is the product of natural selection, rather than of bioengineering.
However, the virus could have originated from a laboratory in a natural state, without having been weaponized. That is most likely what Wray had in mind when he spoke publicly on the topic. China, of course, has angrily dismissed the FBI director’s comments, and has called on the United States to “look to its own biological laboratories scattered across the world when searching for the virus’s source”. This statement reflects Beijing’s absurd view—which flies in the face of every statistical analysis conducted by experts, including leading Chinese scientists— that the COVID-19’s originated in the United States, rather than in China.
Nevertheless, we need an answer for the sake of human security on our planet. A few days after Wray’s interview, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist and the World Health Organization’s technical lead on COVID-19, said the WHO had contacted the United States to inquire about the information that informed the FBI’s assessment. She was echoed by WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who called for “any country [with] information about the origins of the pandemic”, including China, to come forward. The WHO Director-General went on to say that “it’s essential for that information to be shared with WHO and the international scientific community”.
The emergence of the next highly infectious respiratory virus is not a matter of “if”, but a matter of “when”. If there is one thing that we learned from the experience of COVID-19 is that intelligence sharing and intelligence cooperation lie at the heart of biosecurity. Despite their political, economic and ideological differences, the United States and China owe it to their world —and to their own citizens— to work in concert on this issue of critical importance. [EIA]