The FBI Director, Christopher Wray, has revealed that the bureau believes that Covid-19 most likely originated from a potential lab incident in a Chinese government-controlled lab. This is the first public confirmation of the FBI’s classified judgement of how the pandemic virus emerged. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted research into coronaviruses, is located near a world-leading virus laboratory. Many scientists have pointed out that there is no evidence to support the theory that the virus leaked from a lab, and other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI’s. Some of them have said that the virus did not start in a lab but instead jumped from animals to humans, although with a low level of certainty. The White House has said there is no consensus across the US government on the origins.
A joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) investigation in 2021 called the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely.” However, the WHO investigation was criticized heavily, and its director-general has since called for a new inquiry, stating that “All hypotheses remain open and require further study.”
In his interview on Tuesday, Mr Wray said China “has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate” efforts to identify the source of the global pandemic. In response, Beijing accused Washington of “political manipulation.”
Some studies suggest the virus made the leap from animals to humans in Wuhan, China, possibly at the city’s seafood and wildlife market. On Monday, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that US President Joe Biden supports “a whole-of-government effort” to discover how Covid began. “We’re just not there [at consensus] yet,” he said. “If we have something that is ready to be briefed to the American people and the Congress, we will do that.”
Tensions in bilateral ties between the US and China have spiked in the wake of the recent spy balloon saga. A bipartisan panel of US lawmakers this week kicked off a series of hearings on the “existential” threat of the ruling Chinese Communist Party. The first session of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party focused on issues such as human rights and the US economy’s dependence on Chinese manufacturing.
Despite the FBI’s belief that Covid-19 most likely originated in a Chinese government-controlled lab, many scientists who have studied the virus have said this week that there is no new scientific evidence pointing to a lab leak. A natural origin is still the more likely theory, according to Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow. “There’s been an accumulation of evidence (what we know about the viruses biology, the close variants circulating in bats and locations of early human cases) that firmly points to a natural origin centered on the Huanan market in Wuhan city,” he said.
