Classified information on COVID origins will be released this week

In March, President Biden signed a bill that required declassification of information about the origins of COVID-19.

“In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security,” Biden said in a statement.

The bill sailed through the Senate and House of Representatives without opposition before being sent to the White House.

The law Biden signed set a 90 day deadline to release the relevant documents which means they should have been released by Sunday June 18. Given that Sunday wasn’t a work day for most government employees you would think the documents would have been released last week. In fact, Sen. Josh Hawley and Mike Braun sent a letter to Biden last Thursday asking him to comply with the deadline. The letter read in part:

As you know, the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 requires the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to “declassify any and all information” relating to links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of COVID-19 within 90 days of the law’s enactment. That deadline, June 18, 2023, is fast approaching. Your Administration has not yet provided any indication of when the relevant material will be declassified.

For reasons that aren’t clear, the Biden administration seems to have decided to give itself some extra time and plans to finally release the documents this week instead. In anticipation of that release the NY Times has a story up suggesting that there’s a reason the CIA and other intel agencies are sitting on the fence about the origin question.

The Energy Department and the F.B.I. favored the theory that a laboratory leak may have caused the pandemic. Five intelligence bodies considered theories of natural transmission — that the coronavirus developed naturally and was transferred to humans at an animal market or other location — more likely. But the C.I.A., the nation’s leading spy agency, would not make an assessment with even a low level of confidence.

This week, intelligence agencies are expected to release declassified material on what they have learned about Covid’s origins, a subject of intense interest and scrutiny among American lawmakers. But people briefed on the material say there is no smoking gun, no body of evidence that sways the intelligence community as a whole, or top C.I.A. analysts, that a lab leak was the more likely origin of the pandemic than natural transmission, or vice versa.

In fact, senior intelligence officials remain more convinced than ever that the agencies are not going to be able to collect a piece of evidence that solves the puzzle.

The reason we don’t know more is that China has repeatedly stood in the way of anyone trying to learn more. What’s frustrating about this article is that its author seems so blase about information that seems pretty central to the question.

Recent news reports have unearthed new information about researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who became sick in 2019. The news reports suggested that one of them could be patient zero. The information about the sick workers was first discovered at the end of the Trump administration. By August 2022, however, intelligence analysts had dismissed the evidence, saying it was not relevant. Intelligence officials determined that the sick workers could not tell them anything about whether a lab leak or natural transmission was more likely. Intelligence agencies view the information about the cases neutrally, arguing that they do not buttress the case for the lab leak or for natural transmission, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.

Ryan Grim, the Intercept journalist who wrote one of the two stories linked above was similarly surprised that information about a possible patient zero working at one of these labs didn’t seem to have much impact on the conclusions of intel agencies when it was first revealed back in 2021.

The news that U.S. intelligence had learned that three Wuhan Institute of Virology lab workers had been hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November 2019, significantly before the outbreak at the city’s seafood market, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in May 2021. But the revelation had curiously little impact on the broader debate over the origin of the pandemic, even as it would invalidate, if confirmed, the claim that the pandemic originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market when the virus allegedly jumped from an animal to a human. No such animal has been identified, but new reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, sourced to three government sources familiar with a State Department investigation, has identified the three lab workers as Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.

It seems to me that if these three scientists had COVID that would pretty much rule out the natural transfer theory based around the wet market. But again, many of the agencies that have seen the information don’t seem to be impressed. The only guess I have here is that China has denied the sick scientists had COVID and is claiming they had the flu and we’re not in a position to prove otherwise.

Finally, a commenter makes a point about who is partly responsible for giving China time and leeway to hide away any inconvenient evidence.

Progressives spent the better part of an entire year banning any mention of lab leak theory on social media platforms and deriding scientists who questioned the wet market origin story.

Of course we’re never going to learn the true origin after progressives silenced rational inquiries under the guise of racism. Three years after the fact, the evidence is destroyed.

While progressives were shouting about the stupid phrase “Kung flu” we may have missed our best chance to press China for the truth.