Biden Orders Intelligence Inquiry Into Origins of
Virus
The directive came as health officials and scientists
have renewed calls for a more rigorous examination.
A renewed debate is taking shape over the possibility
that the coronavirus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
in China.
Michael D.
ShearJulian E. BarnesCarl ZimmerBenjamin Mueller
By Michael
D. Shear, Julian E. Barnes, Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller
May 26,
2021
WASHINGTON
— President Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies on Wednesday to
investigate the origins of the coronavirus, indicating that his administration
takes seriously the possibility that the deadly virus was accidentally leaked
from a lab, in addition to the prevailing theory that it was transmitted by an
animal to humans outside a lab.
In a
statement, Mr. Biden made it clear that the C.I.A. and other intelligence
agencies had not yet reached a consensus on how the virus, which prompted a
pandemic and has killed almost 600,000 Americans, originated in China. He
directed them to report back to him in 90 days.
“I have now
asked the intelligence community to redouble their efforts to collect and
analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion,” the
president said.
Mr. Biden’s
statement, his most public and expansive yet on the question of how the virus
spread to humans, came as top health officials renewed their appeals this week
for a more rigorous inquiry. And it followed mounting criticism of a report
from an international team of experts convened by the World Health Organization
that largely dismissed the possibility that the virus had accidentally escaped
from a Chinese laboratory called the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Deep
uncertainty remains about the origins of a virus that spread to every part of
the globe over 17 months. The assessments of scientists are largely unchanged:
Many believe that a so-called natural spillover from animal to human remains
the most plausible explanation. While U.S. intelligence agencies have collected
some new evidence, the additional information is not enough to allow them to
draw definitive conclusions about long-simmering theories regarding the lab in
the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak.
But the
president’s carefully worded directive underscored a new surge in interest
about the lab, which President Donald J. Trump and some of his top aides
repeatedly blamed for the pandemic. Some scientists attributed the renewed
focus on the lab to Mr. Trump’s departure from the White House — and being less
identified with the theory — while others said it reflected the deep
frustrations with the recent W.H.O. report that was co-written by Chinese
scientists.
Avril D.
Haines, the director of national intelligence, has been working with various
intelligence agencies, bringing together officials with divergent views to
discuss them, to review the shifting science and to push for additional
intelligence collection.
Still, Mr.
Biden’s order was an abrupt example of presidential intervention in the
collection of raw data by those charged with collecting and analyzing
intelligence on his behalf. Presidents are often hesitant to appear becoming
overly involved in the preparation of the intelligence briefings they receive,
though Mr. Biden has been active in asking for intelligence reports on issues
including Russian aggressions and domestic terrorism.
The
president had asked in March for an internal assessment of the virus’s origins,
which was delivered to him two weeks ago in his Presidential Daily Brief of
intelligence, according to a senior White House official and an administration
official. That started a discussion, the officials said, about declassifying
some of the findings and having intelligence officials issue a public
statement.
The
statement — which described the lack of consensus among intelligence agencies —
was ready this week, but Mr. Biden felt it would not help clarify the issue for
the public, according to the senior official. And on Tuesday, China took a hard
line against cooperating with the W.H.O. on further inquiries, which prompted
Mr. Biden to press for a more robust United States investigation, the official
said.
It was
unclear whether Mr. Biden was also moved to act by a public shift in opinion by
some scientists or political pressure from Mr. Trump’s Republican allies on
Capitol Hill, who have repeatedly accused the president and Democrats of
refusing to take the lab origin theory seriously.
Seizing a
lull on the Senate floor on Wednesday night, Senators Mike Braun of Indiana and
Josh Hawley of Missouri, both Republicans, passed their bill to declassify
intelligence related to any potential links between the Chinese lab and the
origins of the pandemic through unanimous consent. It came after the Senate on
Tuesday unanimously agreed to include two Republican provisions to a huge
package of China legislation aimed at prohibiting sending American funding to
the Wuhan Institute of Virology or to China-based “gain of function” research,
in which scientists intentionally try to make a pathogen more powerful.
“For over a
year, anyone asking questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been
branded as a conspiracy theorist,” Mr. Hawley said. “The world needs to know if
this pandemic was the product of negligence at the Wuhan lab, but the C.C.P.
has done everything it can to block a credible investigation.”
In the past
several days, the White House had played down the need for an investigation led
by the United States and insisted that the W.H.O. was the proper place for an
international inquiry. Mr. Biden’s statement on Wednesday was an abrupt shift.
The
scientific and political debate about how the virus became a global threat to
humans has been simmering since the beginning of the pandemic. For much of that
time, scientists around the world have concluded that it most likely emerged
from an infected animal.
There was
clear evidence for the coronavirus having emerged naturally through the
recombination of genetic material from different bat coronaviruses, said Dr.
Robert Garry, a virologist at the Tulane University School of Medicine. The
data so far bears the hallmarks of natural recombination, he said, and no signs
of human intervention.
“The pieces
are out there,” Dr. Garry said. “These viruses mix bits and pieces all the
time.”
But others
have long suspected that the global health crisis was man-made, pointing to the
Chinese lab as the likely source of the pathogen. Mr. Trump repeatedly accused
the Chinese of covering up their complicity. Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s trade
adviser, suggested that it had been created in a Chinese bioweapons lab.
Days before
he left office, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a fact sheet about the
Wuhan Institute of Virology, outlining evidence that the virus might have
emerged accidentally from the facility. Among other data points Mr. Pompeo
released was that the government had “reason to believe that several
researchers inside the W.I.V. became sick in autumn 2019, before the first
identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19
and common seasonal illnesses.”
The Wall
Street Journal reported on Sunday that the information about the sick
researchers released by Mr. Pompeo had been contained in intelligence documents
prepared at the end of the Trump administration.
At least
two intelligence documents produced in recent months discuss the sick workers,
according to an American official. One is narrowly focused on information about
the three people, and a broader document put the intelligence in the context of
what is known about the origins of the coronavirus.
The
intelligence on the three workers came from outside the United States
intelligence agencies’ own collection, which means its veracity is more
difficult to authenticate. The source of the information was unclear, but
several American officials said they believed the report that the three
researchers got sick.
American
intelligence officials do not know whether the lab workers contracted Covid-19
or some other disease, like a bad flu. If they did have the coronavirus, the
intelligence may suggest that they could have become sick from the lab, but it
also could simply mean that the virus was circulating in Wuhan earlier than the
Chinese government has acknowledged.
Also toward
the end of Mr. Trump’s term, State Department officials began examining the
origins of the virus and concluded that it was highly unlikely to have appeared
naturally and thus was likely the product of laboratory work.
CNN first
reported the effort and suggested that the group’s efforts had been shut down
by the Biden administration, prompting scathing Republican criticism. A State
Department spokesman, Ned Price, denied that, saying that the team’s findings
were briefed to senior officials in the department’s arms control bureau in
February and March.
“With the
report delivered, the work was ended,” Mr. Price said.
Mr. Trump
issued a statement on Tuesday boasting of his early insistence that the Wuhan
lab was the source of the virus. “To me, it was obvious from the beginning,” he
said. “But I was badly criticized, as usual.”
Despite the
absence of new evidence, a number of scientists have lately begun speaking out
about the need to remain open to the possibility that the virus had
accidentally emerged from a lab, perhaps after it was collected in nature, a
lab origin distinct from a creation by scientists.
“It is most
likely that this is a virus that arose naturally, but we cannot exclude the
possibility of some kind of a lab accident,” Dr. Francis Collins, the director
of the National Institutes of Health, told senators on Wednesday.
Some
scientists attributed the shift in part to the fact that the more extreme
proponents of a lab leak hypothesis, like Mr. Navarro, had drowned out the more
measured discussions of how lab workers could have accidentally carried the
virus outside.
Scientists
had been reluctant to discuss the lab leak hypothesis last year because they
had been on guard against disinformation, said Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard
epidemiologist.
“Nobody
wants to succumb to conspiracy theories,” he said.
But the
March report by the group of W.H.O.-chosen experts in collaboration with
Chinese scientists, dismissing the possibility of a lab leak as “extremely
unlikely,” compelled some scientists to speak out.
“When I
read that, I was very frustrated,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale
University. Along with Professor Lipsitch, she signed a letter published in the
journal Science this month saying that there was not enough evidence to decide
whether a natural origin or an accidental laboratory leak caused the
coronavirus pandemic.
“I think
it’s really an unanswered question that really needs more rigorous
investigation,” Dr. Iwasaki added.
From the
earliest weeks of the outbreak, the Chinese government has worked to delay,
deflect or block independent investigation of the virus’s origins.
Chinese
officials said in early 2020 that the outbreak began at a Wuhan market, and
they blamed illegal wildlife sales there. They did so despite having evidence
that undermined that theory: Early data showed that four of the first five
coronavirus patients had no clear links to the market. The government resisted
accepting an international scientific mission.
The World
Health Organization gave early cover to China’s dissembling, incorrectly
praising Chinese disease surveillance with spotting an outbreak that it had
actually missed. The health organization publicly announced that China had
agreed to share biological samples — but never followed up to say that the
government had failed to deliver on that promise.
China has
also pushed conspiracy theories, including that the disease was spread by the
American military, and argued that any origin investigation should start in
Europe, not in China. Chinese officials and state media have also frequently
taken a defensive stance.
On
Wednesday, Zhao Lijian, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, sidestepped a question
about whether the W.H.O. would be permitted to do further investigation in
China, saying that an “authoritative study report” with “many significant
conclusions” had already been issued.
Instead,
Mr. Zhao sought to deflect attention from China, pointing to what he called the
reports of Covid-19 being detected as early as 2019 in other parts of the
world. He also referred again to the baseless theory that the virus came from a
United States Army lab.
“China
takes the origin-tracing work seriously with a responsible attitude, and has
made positive contributions that are widely recognized,” Mr. Zhao said. “If the
U.S. side truly demands a completely transparent investigation, it should
follow China’s lead to invite the W.H.O. experts to the U.S.”
Even as the
debate about the virus’s origins has resurfaced in recent weeks, there has been
little public discussion of the issue in China. On Wednesday, many on Chinese
social media were more preoccupied with discussing the death of Yuan Longping,
a prominent plant scientist, and a deadly ultramarathon in the northwestern
Chinese region of Gansu.
Reporting
was contributed by James Gorman, Noah Weiland, Catie Edmondson, Amy Qin, Matt
Apuzzo, Selam Gebrekidan and Michael Crowley.
Michael D.
Shear is a White House correspondent. He previously worked at The Washington
Post and was a member of their Pulitzer Prize-winning team that covered the
Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. @shearm
Julian E.
Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the
intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about
security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook
Carl Zimmer
writes the “Matter” column. He is the author of fourteen books, including
“Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive.” @carlzimmer • Facebook
Benjamin
Mueller is a United Kingdom correspondent for The New York Times. Before that,
he had been a police and law enforcement reporter on the Metro desk since 2014.
@benjmueller
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