The Biden administration divulges information on the Wuhan lab

 

According to declassified material, American intelligence services are unaware of the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.

According to a report issued today by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, all federal agencies "continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection."

In the autumn of 2019, just before the pandemic started, researchers at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronavirus research was being done in the city where Covid initially surfaced, were ill.

The Wall Street Journal revealed this week that one of the ill researchers, Ben Hu, had researched on coronaviruses with U.S. funding, corroborating information from journalists at the Substack blog Public.

The revelation was pounced upon by proponents of the lab leak idea as almost conclusive evidence that their theory was accurate.

It's not quite certain, according to the intelligence report.

In spite of the fact that a number of Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers "fell mildly ill in Autumn 2019," the report notes that "they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with Covid-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to Covid-19."

The investigation does reveal that when researching coronaviruses, the Wuhan facility did not always follow safety procedures.

The intelligence agencies claim that institute researchers have genetically modified coronaviruses, but they lack evidence that the researchers worked on the variety that sparked the outbreak.

The Wuhan institution, according to the article, is known to have worked with the Chinese Army, but primarily on defensive initiatives aimed at enhancing China's biosecurity and early illness warning systems.