CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

It’s also important to weight dramatic changes in the White House this week, too, right? There’s the intel itself, but then there’s also the guy trying to control the news cycle.

Lab leak and zoonotic origin are not mutually exclusive.

The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.

The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.

Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

> Reanalysis of the H1N1 sequences excluding isolates with unrealistic sampling dates indicates that the 1977 re-emergent lineage was circulating for approximately one year before detection, making it difficult to determine the geographic source of reintroduction. We suggest that a new method is needed to account for viral isolates with unrealistic sampling dates.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/

I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.

Tangentially, risks like that are why I'm really frustrated-with/exasperated-by certain mRNA-vaccine scaremongers: Ones who act as if older techniques were already fine and sufficient.

Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...

You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.

“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?

Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.

there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade). now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.

any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)

>That was before anyone in the news was saying that.

May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.

If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?

Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.

If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.

I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.

Sources?

> they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days

CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.

They say that there is no new data. That they are just altering their choice for what assumption is more likely.

Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...

But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.

Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.

Sure they could, they seem to be using chatgpt for executive orders so why not this.

This assumes operatives haven’t been working on this plan long before the regime took office.

That’s certainly motivation for releasing it, but he’s been in office for five days so the analysis being released was done under the prior administration.

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The blame game is kind of like a variation of a bikeshed discussion, except it might lead to war.

War happens to be my least favourite colour for a bikeshed...

I think the parent is arguing that lab leak is plausible, even if it wasn’t certainly the cause. GoF is foolish if you think the lab leak was remotely plausible.

Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.

We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.

I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.

Gain of function research in a lab you can't (and more damningly won't) prove had adequate precautions is bad regardless of the source of Covid or the utility of the research. We should be taking it as a wake up call to make sure standards are appropriate and the institutions to make sure those standards are met are strong.

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened.

The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

At the very least, we hopefully learned not to subsidize and encourage gain of function research at labs that were already known pre-Covid to have poor hygiene and containment practices.

Nobody in this thread seems to know what gain of function means. It's a very broad term covering a large percentage of all virology research. If you ban it, you might as well say that we don't want to do any research into understanding viruses from now on.

When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.

The question of whether we should do gain-of-function research is a fairly complex cost/benefit analysis. The precise cause of the 2019 pandemic is only a very minor variable in that analysis, because that specific outcome doesn't change the underlying probability of a lab leak. More to the point, do we realistically believe that everyone will stop doing it, even if there's a credible international moratorium? If not, then we need to plan accordingly.

I’ve seen no compelling evidence gain of function has benefited us in any pandemic — or even a theoretical justification.

How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?

Edit:

Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.

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The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market.

The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.

Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.

Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.

A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.

Forgive the silly question, but does the lab leak theory entail the virus being engineered in the lab, or simply sampled from nature by researchers then not adequately contained?

I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?

How many times do we need to repeat "lab leak != intentionally lab engineered"? Your most relevant parts are all about the latter. You know this, yet muddy the waters.

You are conflating two things - a lab leak and a virus being engineered. These are two separate things.

Likely, the virus was not engineered but was stored in the laboratory.

Very good summary, but the problem is, like most things, it is impossible to 100% rule out the lab theory. It is always possible to look at one of these evidences and say "yeah, but ...". And given how politicized this question is, people are just going to believe what they want to believe. I am quite pessimistic about this, that people will remain rational.

> Officials are saying that, true.

I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.

I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.

> That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.

The decision to not release by the previous director and the decision to release by the new director probably were political to some extent. But I agree with you that the report's impact is too marginal to assume its creation or conclusion was politically motivated. But I think that for a different reason: I doubt adding yet another "low confidence" agency report onto the pile of existing ones changes much - either in geo-political super power negotiations or in the mind of the American public.

The issue has been played out and it's not top of mind or relevant anymore. The majority of people have already made up their minds one way or the other - or decided it doesn't matter anymore and they don't care. Pretty much everyone already acknowledges we'll never know for sure.

> ... giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation.

That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia):

https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-e...

"There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president."

"There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war."

"Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."

"China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis."

this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.

Cover-ups are a cultural thing in East Asia because reputation is paramount. They'll attempt to cover up anything that makes them look bad as means to protect their reputation. So the second part of your statement is not necessarily true.

You can, in fact, imagine other things.

For example, maybe the people shutting down the investigation had no idea what it would find and just didn't want to take the chance.

Or you understand that there is going to be a viral outbreak and you can choose: save the rest of the world from the pandemic or limit information and allow people to spread the virus globally to ensure that your nation doesn’t suffer disproportionately.

DOE has its own massive farm of experts: https://www.energy.gov/intelligence/office-intelligence-and-...

There’s 17 intelligence agencies that all staff knowledgeable experts on all sorts of topics. Our government is Leviathan.

The National Labs, where a tremendous amount of infectious disease work is done for national-scale questions. I've worked with them in the past, and considered taking a job with them - of the various agencies, they're the ones who have weighed in with probably the most expertise.

> President Obama had banned it through an executive order.

Can you provide a link to the executive order? It sounds seriously strange.

The practical difference is that many of the arguments against lab-leak theories in general are actually arguments against the gain-of-function theory in particular. Things like lack of markers that would indicate engineering, or the presence of markers that would indicate animal origins. So distinguishing the two candidate theories becomes important for discerning whether the evidence is for or against a lab leak: you can't use animal-origins evidence as evidence against a lab leak, only evidence against an engineered virus.

I think the natural-virus-leaked-by-lab theory hinges on the argument that, (assuming it was true, then) had the lab leak not have happened, SARS-CoV-2 wouldn't have made to jump to human by itself. And this is where the Ebola analogy breaks down. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a higher basic reproduction number than Ebola, meaning it's more transmissible. And it's also much less deadly than Ebola, meaning it has much more opportunities to spread.

Remember, it is a virus that caused a global pandemic, despite all the efforts made to stop it. Based on that, I think it is highly likely that whether the lab leaked it or not, it would have made its way to humans by itself. In other words, there would effectively be no way to tell one scenario from the other.

One way to look at the difference is that a "natural Ebola" almost certainly would have spread at some point anyways, and so it wouldn't affect the total number of world deaths in the end, just make them happen some number of years sooner.

Whereas an "artificial Ebola" would never have existed without it being intentionally created, so all the deaths aren't just time-shifted, they wouldn't have happened otherwise. They're new.

the "practical difference" is that zoonotic spillover and lab leak may not be mutually exclusive theories.

It guides policy. If it was engineered, it means this is research we really shouldn't be doing. If it was a wild virus being researched, it means we need to take the threat of spillover more seriously.

You've made great points throughout this entire post. This is yet another that I've just upvoted (from having been downvoted). But in each you've been needlessly aggressive and hostile. Everyone here knows how frustrating COVID-19 can be to discuss—as is the case with most topics worth discussing. But it's less frustrating when we all implicitly agree to stick to our thoughtful great points.

A hypothetical lab worker which only spread it to the market and nowhere else seems implausible.

I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.

There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.

That is possible, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. E.g. if I am reading the paper correctly, they say that there is evidence of two distinct spillover lineages, which wouldn't be consistent with a simple visit from a lab worker.

They really are mutually exclusive theories.

The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.

If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.

> It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019.

What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.

Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...

They could as well say "We aren't sharing our real sources, but we have high confidence."

But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything.

They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe.

But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.

There will be no major discrediting of China since the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan labs was funded by the National Institute of Health. This was firmly and unequivocally established by the hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Refer to “Overseeing the Overseers: A Hearing with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak”.

Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.

Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.

The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.

Just like the “Spanish Flu” didn’t originate in Spain. And information about it was suppressed in the US.

> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.

The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.

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> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.

Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.

It's not obvious that international bodies are the answer. Health agencies the world over lied through their teeth to manipulate the public to take specific actions.

So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.

You think China, in the 1950s, was opening research labs at the behest of the CIA?

> The lab was founded by the CIA

What evidence do you have for this claim?

Yes and I’m saying that was bad.

Hopefully this helps people realize how meaningless it is to be labeled a conspiracy theorist.

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The major reason for that is that many were doing this in language that was generally considered racist and/or mixed in some other weird stuff like how COVID lockdowns were like the Jewish persecution, rants about masking, or that type of stuff. I'm not saying everyone did that, but there was a huge overlap.

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Were they? Or were those who claimed it was the only possible answer, without the evidence to back that up?

The fact that there's a biolab doing gain-of-function research a few blocks away from ground zero is much stronger bayesian evidence than "but maybe it's true".

(And then the fact that ground zero is a wet market is strong evidence against. It's so weird that we have two plausible origins for this virus and they're almost right next to each other.)

> was rightly rejected by people who care more about evidence than spreading hatred.

The French CNRS, well know to be a right-wing US actor wanting to spread hate

https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/la-question-de-lorigine-d...

I think you're confusing genetic engineering with the bioweapons research. The WIV did collect natural coronaviruses and genetically engineer them.

That this is someone's fault and they can be punished is, I think, the reason people want it to be true. Rather than the world is a terrifying place that sometimes kills millions.

Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.

China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.

Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.

And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.

If it could be blamed on "China", it could as well be blamed on "the US" for having also funded that lab, and likely having been responsible for what security measures it would have.

And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.

Or less nefarious: that they mishandled an extracted virus /someone got bitten by a bat in the lab and was allowed to leave without quarantine.

Except for the part they left out which is that the lab was being funded by the US government and its GoF research directed by a US nonprofit entity with strong ties to the NIH.

No it wouldn't imply that at all. The same animals ending up in wet markets could have ended up in labs. Nothing to imply it was engineered, which is a whole other level of culpability. Sucks that so many people are itching to make this leap.

> lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory

This was literally outsourced US DoD research...

There are two campuses in Wuhan. One has BSL-3 facilities, the other BSL-4. Not all work is done at the highest BSL available for cost and practicality reasons though. American rules were that research on agents in the same classification as COVID is BSL-3, but routine diagnostic work is only BSL-2. Chinese researchers classified both at BSL-2.

It may be true that other states don't want to antagonize them, and that may also be why we don't see enough emphasis placed on how absurd it is that China has allowed these wet markets to exist so long. Imposing a basic set of health codes is a very fundamental task of any government, and their inability or unwillingness to do so does not reflect well on them.

If anything, one reason why the China hawks may prefer the lab leak theory is because it makes China look more threatening than the alternative: the we-couldn't-enforce-basic-health-codes version of the story doesn't mesh well with the image we have in the West of the CCP as an all-powerful Big Brother that has complete control over every aspect of their citizens' lives. It instead projects a CCP that can barely perform the minimum functions of a state, which is harder to be afraid of.

Even in the wildlife spillover case don't you still blame it on people doing business with bat carcasses or was there some kind of obviously fine as an animal product intermediary between the bats and the people?

There's a greater burden of proof for spillover when there just happens to be a lab doing virus research near the epicenter of the outbreak.

Edit: name checks out.

>It makes the pandemic deterministic

I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.

>It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.

>It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.

>finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades

The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.

Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.

Yeah, I think this hits closer to home: the zoonotic origins story makes the Chinese government look incompetent. They actually are much less competent than Western popular culture likes to paint them, but emphasizing that doesn't provide a very effective external threat to rally the masses against.

A lab leak plays into the stereotypical German or Russian mad scientist trope of the 20th century: the incredibly powerful supervillain who in their hubris (nearly) destroys the world.

>Just think about it

This always proceeds a cogent point.

>what's the difference between negligence and malice?

Wrong, these are both theories of Chinese negligence. Did you mean the difference in culpability for positive and negative action? The lab leak is negative action by the Chinese government, and positive action by some subset of the Chinese citizenry. Zoonosis is positive action by the Chinese government. China (government U citizenry) are 100% culpable either way.

Malice only appears in fringe theories about intentional release, which isn't a lab leak by definition.

Why don't you just answer the question? A lab leak makes China look incompetent.

It means sick animals infecting lab staff. It doesn't make it look malicious, it doesn't mean engineered bioweaponry, actively playing with fire or any other unsupported conspiracy nonsense.

There’s an asymmetry of potential evidence for each of the theories as well.

• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.

• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.

It would be trivial for the Chinese to determine if covid 19 matches with what they were investigating in the lab, and if the people in the lab were among the first infected.

>> Keeping secrets is hard

No it's not. I mean depending on the definition of secret.

It's not a secret that covid was a lab leak. It's common knowledge. The way you keep a "secret" is to sanction people that tell the truth.

Covid was a lab leak. Not a secret. Also, in certain circles, not allowed to say that.

But I don't belong to those circles. Covid was a lab leak.

> I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen.

Why bother assuming? Why isn’t “I don’t know” good enough?

If I ask "what happened?" whatever you answer will be disagreed with by about half the observers of the question.

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The head of a underpants subscription telemarketing firm is probably trusting his underlings more than the head of the CIA.

It is an interesting angle, because now he could potentially be subpoenaed by Congress or anyone else, and it seems unlikely that he would perjure himself over anything after 2014.

That pardon means that person is available for subpoena and cannot decline to answer any question.

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> The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

From "we don't know if it was a lab leak or spread from the market" to "we think it maybe is". Sure, they started this investigation with Biden, but just released it a couple of days ago AND they have even low confidence on it. So, why release it if the confidence is low? Why now? The answer is: new government, new conclusions.

>US did not allow any outsiders to check out Fort Detrick which means they knew it was a US engineered bioweapon. US has no credibility here.

PRC maintains covid came from outside of PRC, they have no reason to let their labs be scrutinized by outside actors just because Mike Pompeo / CIA made up antiPRC propaganda. That's want weak idiots do. Reality is PRC already waste effort entertaining WHO, until US reciprocates by openning up US biolabs for international access to entertain PRC propaganda, they nor their narrative or people that endorse them have credibility either.

Date on the article you linked is 24 Jan 2020.