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Two federal agencies, the Energy Department and the FBI, reignite the debate over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began naturally or whether the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab. The White House says there's no consensus in the intelligence community, but why was the lab-leak theory dismissed for so long, and are we any closer to finding the truth?
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
Kyle Peterson: The energy Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigations say they believe the Covid 19 pandemic began with a lab leak. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues, columnist Allysia Finley and editorial board member Mene Ukueberuwa. The Wall Street Journal had a huge scoop on Sunday saying that the US Department of Energy had concluded that the Covid 19 virus began with a lab leak in Wuhan China. And one thing that I think is important to say the outset here Allysia, is there were some comments, a daily show made a joke that the host was waiting for the DMV to weigh in here. But correct me if I'm wrong, the Energy Department has some real serious expertise on the biological side as well, doesn't it?
Allysia Finley: Right. So I think the people forget that the Energy Department oversees our national laboratories and does actually do a lot of studying on biotechnology and emerging biological and chemical threats in addition to overseeing our nuclear technology. So it has particular expertise actually in the scientific realm. And actually if you go to the website, they note that we employ world class facilities and up to the minute advances in the biosciences, physical sciences, nanotechnology and imaging and measurement science to solve problems and matter. And this also involves genomics, molecular technology and nanotechnology. So if I were to guess what they were doing is, one, they have expertise in what happens in labs and how potentially you could get a lab leak, but I would also guess that they had carefully examined actually this genetic sequence of the virus and that's how they came to their conclusion.
Kyle Peterson: The other thing that was notable about The Journal's story is that apparently the Department of Energy's judgment was based on quote new intelligence and we don't know what that new intelligence is, but this story has reignited the long debate over Covids origins. And then adding to this whole mix this week was the FBI director, Christopher Ray, here is what he said on Fox News on Tuesday.
Christopher Wray: The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. Let me step back for a second. The FBI has folks, agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, et cetera, who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses like Covid and the concerns that in the wrong hands, some bad guys, a hostile nation state, a terrorist, a criminal, the threats that those could pose. So here you're talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government controlled lab that killed millions of Americans, and that's precisely what that capability was designed for.
Kyle Peterson: Let's also listen to a White House spokesman, John Kirby, on Monday. This is him speaking before the FBI director there, but responding to the story on the Department of Energy's conclusion.
John Kirby: There is not a consensus right now in the US government about exactly how Covid started. There is just not an intelligence community consensus. And I would add that one of the things the President did was, he's the one who tasked the national labs which report up through the Department of Energy to study this as well. So it wasn't just an effort that was confined to the intelligence community. That work is still ongoing, but the president believes it's really important that we continue that work and that we find out as best we can how it started so that we can better prevent a future pandemic. What the president wants is facts.
Kyle Peterson: Mene, what do you make of this? And it's true as John Kirby says there, that the intelligence community is divided on this question. There are some agencies who believe the lab leak thesis is the most likely one. There are other agencies who think that a natural origin of Covid evolving, essentially jumping over species barriers is more probable and they have varying weights of confidence on these judgements too. The Department of Energy's analysis is given with low confidence and so it makes it hard to know which way to fall here, but at least it seems like both of these options are still live and on the table.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, it's a very odd situation to be in to have the intelligence community and other top US agencies in disagreement publicly about such an important question. I think the most charitable way that you could possibly interpret the disagreement is that this is live science taking place before our eyes. These agencies probably are reviewing somewhat different evidence or at least assigning different weights to different sorts of evidence. And you have intelligent, competent people coming to different conclusions, which hopefully will be hashed out. But I think that the public could be forgiven for being a little bit more suspicious and thinking these agencies probably have looked at largely the same intelligence. You would hope that they're sharing it with each other and if there are certain ones that are coming to different conclusions or who are unwilling to say that they think a lab leak might be the most likely origin of the virus, it's possible that they're doing so for politicized reasons. And obviously the course of the entire pandemic beginning in March, 2020 has showed us that a lot of the US public health bureaucracy is willing and able to politicize its evaluation of the science when it thinks it has a reason to do that. And so whatever the reason for the disagreement is, I do think that the White House should be making sure that the people who are disagreeing are getting together and conferring about their differences and that we are able to come to a unified conclusion about what we think the most likely origin was because it's going to have consequences. If we do believe that the lab leak was the real origin, then that should demand a united US response. There should be a demand that investigators from around the world be able to more closely inspect the lab and to get evidence that China has been withholding. And so that should be the direction that we're going. How can we get to a consensus and what are we going to ask China to do or say in response if we do decide that we believe the lab leak is true?
Kyle Peterson: What makes the endorsement of the lab leak hypothesis by these serious agencies all the more notable though is, I think, Allysia how quickly and for how long the lab leak hypothesis was ruled out by public health experts who treated it generally as a conspiracy theory. And it seemed like that broke sometime last year and people begin really thinking about it as a real possibility. But Allysia to what do you attribute that early group think that was ruling out the lab leak hypothesis even before, I think, we really had enough evidence to make a judgment one way or the other.
Allysia Finley: What's interesting about this is so the intercept to actually produce certain did report last month or January in which it got some redacted emails between Anthony Fauci and some other scientists from very early on in the pandemic. And they were confronted with evidence of the virus and they were concerned that there were conspiracy theories that were starting to circulate that this was a lab leak. What's interesting is that Fauci's first impression was, well yes, this came from a lab. This did was not a zoonotic origins. There was the spillover from an animal batter (inaudible). The genetic sequence of the virus actually pointed to a lab leak and that actually has to do with a furin cleavage site on the virus that is not present in any other corona viruses that are known with a similar lineage. And what makes this furin and cleavage site interesting is that it makes it much more infectious to humans. And so other viruses like HIV have it, the avian flu has it, but other viruses that are really very dangerous but also that bind to the human cell easily, have this cleavage site. But no other coronavirus was similar to this one that they sequenced had that site. So that initially suggested that while there was some kind of experimentation going on, maybe it wasn't malicious in itself, but there was some lab experiments. It's very easy when you don't have very good security protocols in place. And just an aside, I have a friend who is an infectious disease or a researcher and she actually visited Chinese labs couple years before the pandemic and was just stunned about the low security protocols that they have in these labs. So it's very easy for a virus, and when you're experimenting with it, to infect a human or perhaps infect a mouse and then it to get out into the wild or into communities and start spreading. I think the reason why they really tried to stifle this or really promote this isn't a lab leak, this is just a natural spillover event. I think one, the N I H was involved in funding gain of research in China through a EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit. So obviously Fauci had his own institutional incentive to downplay this, but I think another reason is the public health or officials were really worried more that if they pin this on China and the lab leak that it would just close up. And they were really relying on China for information about the virus early on in the pandemic and they want to maintain or keep China transparent. And if you recalled with SARS, they weren't transparent about anything and they were rebuked later, but we were really trying to encourage China to be transparent by not criticizing it too much. And I think that was actually a mistake. Maybe there's some people on the left who were worried about racism and that if you claim that this was Chinese made, people would turn against Asians. I think there are some of that also going on, but I think also the fundamental issue is Trump embraced this idea that this was a lab leak and reflexively and much of the scientific community and public health community which tends to lean left, they reflexively then just opposed it and dug in.
Kyle Peterson: Hang tight, will be right back. You're listening to Potomac Watch from The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 7: Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is Potomac watch.
Kyle Peterson: Welcome back. To pick up on a point that Allysia made before the break, I think there's something to it that the public health officials were trying to push back against what they saw as rampant speculation and that turned into a group think. If you go back and think about what was happening right when Covid first arrived on the scene and then arrived in the United States, there were all sorts of theories floating around. Everything from natural origin to it was an accidental lab leak to this was a bio-engineered weapon that was released and, Mene, I wonder what you make of this idea. It seems to me that there were efforts to push back against the wildest of those ideas and that became a failure to distinguish between some of the more reasonable ideas, the idea that there was a accidental leak. And even with the word bio-engineered that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Some people hear that and they think, oh, this was a weapon that was created intentionally. Some people hear that and they think gain of function research where you are stressing a virus in order to give it new capabilities that would qualify count as bio-engineered. But if you look at some of the things that Senator Tom Cotton was saying at the time, he was well, I think, on the reasonable end of that spectrum, talking about maybe this was an accidental leak from the virology research lab that happens to be in Wuhan where the outbreak began and yet he was cast, I think, in the same category as people who were advancing theories that, to me, look a little more far-fetched.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Right. I think that Tom Cotton (inaudible) really was the most singular flashpoint in the beginning of this debate about how plausible the lab leak origin theory was. He probably was the first very mainstream figure to float it in a high profile way. And the reaction to it was exactly as you described. It seemed like a lot of people immediately brushed it off and exaggerated the claim that was being made. They projected onto Tom Cotton and other people asking for more scrutiny of the possibility that Covid originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The idea that they were suggesting that it was created deliberately as a super weapon by the Chinese government or even that it was released into the world deliberately, which was never the case being made by the most serious people who were focusing on the lab leak theory. It boggles the mind to think about because the coincidence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology being in the same city where this disease originated should have made everyone stop and think, this automatically should go to the top of our speculation list. This should automatically be granted, at least, plausibility as a theory and as more evidence was aggregated, it continued to climb and continued to climb. But because of that harsh reaction that took place in that very beginning of the lab leak theories public presence, it has taken so long, it's actually taken years for mainstream people in the public health community and generally people on the left to give the theory the seriousness that they should have.
Kyle Peterson: One more thought that I would add is that because we know that viruses are evolving all the time and jumping species barriers, at least in my mind in the early days and months, it seemed reasonable to hold off on speculation and see what the researchers can find. And what's notable is as, Allysia, you described a little bit earlier, they have not found any close relatives to the Covid virus in the wild. And so to that extent, I think the lab leak is strengthened. It's a diagnosis of exclusion because you can't find anything in the wild. And we know how this normally plays out. I would look back at the SARS outbreak and that started in 2002 and it took until 2017 to find the specific cave with a single population of horseshoe bats. This is a nature article that harbors virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans. But as early as January 5th, 2005, there are news stories where Chinese officials in some province are killing every civic cat in captivity because they found a man who had fallen ill with a new SARS strain that was genetically similar to the one that was circulating in these civic cats. And so that was within a year or two of the initial SARS outbreak and, Allysia, there were already some pretty strong, it seems to me, links to animal hosts. And that is the huge open question, the huge red flag to the natural spillover theory is we are now four years and change, I think, and counting from the initial Covid emergence and yet for all of the researchers who have tried to find it, they still don't seem to have that link.
Allysia Finley: The virus shares about a 96% similarity to what they call a progenitor virus that was collected at a cave in China. But again, the problem is that they don't have any traces of any spillover into other species which is what you generally find if there is a spillover fact and you see a gradual evolution. You don't really see that in this case. And again, there's the question, where did this furin cleavage site come from and the viruses genetic makeup. A lot of the public health community has been, for years, warning about this zoonotic spillover. We're hearing it again with the avian flu that's sickening a lot of chickens and they've now founded mink species and there's been a big buildup. Bill Gates, as well, has been warning that this is going to be an event that's going to happen and we need to do more studying on this and such. And that was actually may have been one of the motivators for doing gain of research function research in China, and actually it's occurring elsewhere, is to learn about how these viruses can spill over and how they can become more lethal. And I think some of the public health community really want to almost vindicate that hypothesis that this could occur. So there was a large and contingent that depends on the government funding to do these kinds of experiments. And I think there was a pecuniar incentive also in that case. And it continues to be to promote this theory of a zoonotic spillover because they continue to get research dollars to study this.
Kyle Peterson: Mene, we'll give you the last word, but what do you suppose the odds are in the short term of getting an answer to this question? Personally, I am not holding my breath. And I am imagining that maybe some years down the line we will have a new Chinese government that decides to open its archives and maybe releases some information that is useful in clearing this up. But given the way that there were efforts to cover up the initial origin stories, the way that China blocked The World Health Organization from really doing a vigorous investigation, I mean, maybe you can count that as evidence for the lab leak theory that they knew there would be something there that the world would not like to see if the investigation were allowed to go forward unimpeded. But it seems, to me, that I think we were going to be living with this uncertainty for a long time if the FBI and the Energy Department and the other elements of the intelligence community can't agree right now after four years of gathering evidence, I find it hard to believe that there's going to be something in the next four years that is going to break that log jam.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Well, I'd separate your question into two parts and ask when is there going to be a consensus within the US government and then when might that consensus lead to some full international accounting where there is a thorough investigation of the site and there's a report that's made that documents it in a harder way based on direct observation. And the first question, I mean, I would hope that President Biden, again, dislikes the disagreement among his agencies and is pushing them to confer and get to a conclusion. But I would imagine that that's not true. That he probably would rather dodge responsibility for pushing people who might be reluctant to endorse the theory of the lab leak origin and that it will continue to exist as a model. But I do believe that we should, regardless, proceed with trying to garner an international consensus among other governments that also believe that the lab leak theory is likely and put a lot of pressure on China to allow some access, more access, any kind of investigation or any kind of record of what they observed in those early days that can help us really create an answer to this question.
Kyle Peterson: Thank you Mene and Allysia. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast@wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button and we'll be back next week with another edition of Potomac Watch.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/opinio...nese-lab/a0050e43-aad9-4c2a-986b-d8dd9af2b6d2
Two federal agencies, the Energy Department and the FBI, reignite the debate over whether the Covid-19 pandemic began naturally or whether the virus escaped from a Wuhan lab. The White House says there's no consensus in the intelligence community, but why was the lab-leak theory dismissed for so long, and are we any closer to finding the truth?
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.
Kyle Peterson: The energy Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigations say they believe the Covid 19 pandemic began with a lab leak. Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We are joined today by my colleagues, columnist Allysia Finley and editorial board member Mene Ukueberuwa. The Wall Street Journal had a huge scoop on Sunday saying that the US Department of Energy had concluded that the Covid 19 virus began with a lab leak in Wuhan China. And one thing that I think is important to say the outset here Allysia, is there were some comments, a daily show made a joke that the host was waiting for the DMV to weigh in here. But correct me if I'm wrong, the Energy Department has some real serious expertise on the biological side as well, doesn't it?
Allysia Finley: Right. So I think the people forget that the Energy Department oversees our national laboratories and does actually do a lot of studying on biotechnology and emerging biological and chemical threats in addition to overseeing our nuclear technology. So it has particular expertise actually in the scientific realm. And actually if you go to the website, they note that we employ world class facilities and up to the minute advances in the biosciences, physical sciences, nanotechnology and imaging and measurement science to solve problems and matter. And this also involves genomics, molecular technology and nanotechnology. So if I were to guess what they were doing is, one, they have expertise in what happens in labs and how potentially you could get a lab leak, but I would also guess that they had carefully examined actually this genetic sequence of the virus and that's how they came to their conclusion.
Kyle Peterson: The other thing that was notable about The Journal's story is that apparently the Department of Energy's judgment was based on quote new intelligence and we don't know what that new intelligence is, but this story has reignited the long debate over Covids origins. And then adding to this whole mix this week was the FBI director, Christopher Ray, here is what he said on Fox News on Tuesday.
Christopher Wray: The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan. Let me step back for a second. The FBI has folks, agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, et cetera, who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses like Covid and the concerns that in the wrong hands, some bad guys, a hostile nation state, a terrorist, a criminal, the threats that those could pose. So here you're talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government controlled lab that killed millions of Americans, and that's precisely what that capability was designed for.
Kyle Peterson: Let's also listen to a White House spokesman, John Kirby, on Monday. This is him speaking before the FBI director there, but responding to the story on the Department of Energy's conclusion.
John Kirby: There is not a consensus right now in the US government about exactly how Covid started. There is just not an intelligence community consensus. And I would add that one of the things the President did was, he's the one who tasked the national labs which report up through the Department of Energy to study this as well. So it wasn't just an effort that was confined to the intelligence community. That work is still ongoing, but the president believes it's really important that we continue that work and that we find out as best we can how it started so that we can better prevent a future pandemic. What the president wants is facts.
Kyle Peterson: Mene, what do you make of this? And it's true as John Kirby says there, that the intelligence community is divided on this question. There are some agencies who believe the lab leak thesis is the most likely one. There are other agencies who think that a natural origin of Covid evolving, essentially jumping over species barriers is more probable and they have varying weights of confidence on these judgements too. The Department of Energy's analysis is given with low confidence and so it makes it hard to know which way to fall here, but at least it seems like both of these options are still live and on the table.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, it's a very odd situation to be in to have the intelligence community and other top US agencies in disagreement publicly about such an important question. I think the most charitable way that you could possibly interpret the disagreement is that this is live science taking place before our eyes. These agencies probably are reviewing somewhat different evidence or at least assigning different weights to different sorts of evidence. And you have intelligent, competent people coming to different conclusions, which hopefully will be hashed out. But I think that the public could be forgiven for being a little bit more suspicious and thinking these agencies probably have looked at largely the same intelligence. You would hope that they're sharing it with each other and if there are certain ones that are coming to different conclusions or who are unwilling to say that they think a lab leak might be the most likely origin of the virus, it's possible that they're doing so for politicized reasons. And obviously the course of the entire pandemic beginning in March, 2020 has showed us that a lot of the US public health bureaucracy is willing and able to politicize its evaluation of the science when it thinks it has a reason to do that. And so whatever the reason for the disagreement is, I do think that the White House should be making sure that the people who are disagreeing are getting together and conferring about their differences and that we are able to come to a unified conclusion about what we think the most likely origin was because it's going to have consequences. If we do believe that the lab leak was the real origin, then that should demand a united US response. There should be a demand that investigators from around the world be able to more closely inspect the lab and to get evidence that China has been withholding. And so that should be the direction that we're going. How can we get to a consensus and what are we going to ask China to do or say in response if we do decide that we believe the lab leak is true?
Kyle Peterson: What makes the endorsement of the lab leak hypothesis by these serious agencies all the more notable though is, I think, Allysia how quickly and for how long the lab leak hypothesis was ruled out by public health experts who treated it generally as a conspiracy theory. And it seemed like that broke sometime last year and people begin really thinking about it as a real possibility. But Allysia to what do you attribute that early group think that was ruling out the lab leak hypothesis even before, I think, we really had enough evidence to make a judgment one way or the other.
Allysia Finley: What's interesting about this is so the intercept to actually produce certain did report last month or January in which it got some redacted emails between Anthony Fauci and some other scientists from very early on in the pandemic. And they were confronted with evidence of the virus and they were concerned that there were conspiracy theories that were starting to circulate that this was a lab leak. What's interesting is that Fauci's first impression was, well yes, this came from a lab. This did was not a zoonotic origins. There was the spillover from an animal batter (inaudible). The genetic sequence of the virus actually pointed to a lab leak and that actually has to do with a furin cleavage site on the virus that is not present in any other corona viruses that are known with a similar lineage. And what makes this furin and cleavage site interesting is that it makes it much more infectious to humans. And so other viruses like HIV have it, the avian flu has it, but other viruses that are really very dangerous but also that bind to the human cell easily, have this cleavage site. But no other coronavirus was similar to this one that they sequenced had that site. So that initially suggested that while there was some kind of experimentation going on, maybe it wasn't malicious in itself, but there was some lab experiments. It's very easy when you don't have very good security protocols in place. And just an aside, I have a friend who is an infectious disease or a researcher and she actually visited Chinese labs couple years before the pandemic and was just stunned about the low security protocols that they have in these labs. So it's very easy for a virus, and when you're experimenting with it, to infect a human or perhaps infect a mouse and then it to get out into the wild or into communities and start spreading. I think the reason why they really tried to stifle this or really promote this isn't a lab leak, this is just a natural spillover event. I think one, the N I H was involved in funding gain of research in China through a EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit. So obviously Fauci had his own institutional incentive to downplay this, but I think another reason is the public health or officials were really worried more that if they pin this on China and the lab leak that it would just close up. And they were really relying on China for information about the virus early on in the pandemic and they want to maintain or keep China transparent. And if you recalled with SARS, they weren't transparent about anything and they were rebuked later, but we were really trying to encourage China to be transparent by not criticizing it too much. And I think that was actually a mistake. Maybe there's some people on the left who were worried about racism and that if you claim that this was Chinese made, people would turn against Asians. I think there are some of that also going on, but I think also the fundamental issue is Trump embraced this idea that this was a lab leak and reflexively and much of the scientific community and public health community which tends to lean left, they reflexively then just opposed it and dug in.
Kyle Peterson: Hang tight, will be right back. You're listening to Potomac Watch from The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 7: Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker, play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.
Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal. This is Potomac watch.
Kyle Peterson: Welcome back. To pick up on a point that Allysia made before the break, I think there's something to it that the public health officials were trying to push back against what they saw as rampant speculation and that turned into a group think. If you go back and think about what was happening right when Covid first arrived on the scene and then arrived in the United States, there were all sorts of theories floating around. Everything from natural origin to it was an accidental lab leak to this was a bio-engineered weapon that was released and, Mene, I wonder what you make of this idea. It seems to me that there were efforts to push back against the wildest of those ideas and that became a failure to distinguish between some of the more reasonable ideas, the idea that there was a accidental leak. And even with the word bio-engineered that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. Some people hear that and they think, oh, this was a weapon that was created intentionally. Some people hear that and they think gain of function research where you are stressing a virus in order to give it new capabilities that would qualify count as bio-engineered. But if you look at some of the things that Senator Tom Cotton was saying at the time, he was well, I think, on the reasonable end of that spectrum, talking about maybe this was an accidental leak from the virology research lab that happens to be in Wuhan where the outbreak began and yet he was cast, I think, in the same category as people who were advancing theories that, to me, look a little more far-fetched.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Right. I think that Tom Cotton (inaudible) really was the most singular flashpoint in the beginning of this debate about how plausible the lab leak origin theory was. He probably was the first very mainstream figure to float it in a high profile way. And the reaction to it was exactly as you described. It seemed like a lot of people immediately brushed it off and exaggerated the claim that was being made. They projected onto Tom Cotton and other people asking for more scrutiny of the possibility that Covid originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The idea that they were suggesting that it was created deliberately as a super weapon by the Chinese government or even that it was released into the world deliberately, which was never the case being made by the most serious people who were focusing on the lab leak theory. It boggles the mind to think about because the coincidence of the Wuhan Institute of Virology being in the same city where this disease originated should have made everyone stop and think, this automatically should go to the top of our speculation list. This should automatically be granted, at least, plausibility as a theory and as more evidence was aggregated, it continued to climb and continued to climb. But because of that harsh reaction that took place in that very beginning of the lab leak theories public presence, it has taken so long, it's actually taken years for mainstream people in the public health community and generally people on the left to give the theory the seriousness that they should have.
Kyle Peterson: One more thought that I would add is that because we know that viruses are evolving all the time and jumping species barriers, at least in my mind in the early days and months, it seemed reasonable to hold off on speculation and see what the researchers can find. And what's notable is as, Allysia, you described a little bit earlier, they have not found any close relatives to the Covid virus in the wild. And so to that extent, I think the lab leak is strengthened. It's a diagnosis of exclusion because you can't find anything in the wild. And we know how this normally plays out. I would look back at the SARS outbreak and that started in 2002 and it took until 2017 to find the specific cave with a single population of horseshoe bats. This is a nature article that harbors virus strains with all the genetic building blocks of the one that jumped to humans. But as early as January 5th, 2005, there are news stories where Chinese officials in some province are killing every civic cat in captivity because they found a man who had fallen ill with a new SARS strain that was genetically similar to the one that was circulating in these civic cats. And so that was within a year or two of the initial SARS outbreak and, Allysia, there were already some pretty strong, it seems to me, links to animal hosts. And that is the huge open question, the huge red flag to the natural spillover theory is we are now four years and change, I think, and counting from the initial Covid emergence and yet for all of the researchers who have tried to find it, they still don't seem to have that link.
Allysia Finley: The virus shares about a 96% similarity to what they call a progenitor virus that was collected at a cave in China. But again, the problem is that they don't have any traces of any spillover into other species which is what you generally find if there is a spillover fact and you see a gradual evolution. You don't really see that in this case. And again, there's the question, where did this furin cleavage site come from and the viruses genetic makeup. A lot of the public health community has been, for years, warning about this zoonotic spillover. We're hearing it again with the avian flu that's sickening a lot of chickens and they've now founded mink species and there's been a big buildup. Bill Gates, as well, has been warning that this is going to be an event that's going to happen and we need to do more studying on this and such. And that was actually may have been one of the motivators for doing gain of research function research in China, and actually it's occurring elsewhere, is to learn about how these viruses can spill over and how they can become more lethal. And I think some of the public health community really want to almost vindicate that hypothesis that this could occur. So there was a large and contingent that depends on the government funding to do these kinds of experiments. And I think there was a pecuniar incentive also in that case. And it continues to be to promote this theory of a zoonotic spillover because they continue to get research dollars to study this.
Kyle Peterson: Mene, we'll give you the last word, but what do you suppose the odds are in the short term of getting an answer to this question? Personally, I am not holding my breath. And I am imagining that maybe some years down the line we will have a new Chinese government that decides to open its archives and maybe releases some information that is useful in clearing this up. But given the way that there were efforts to cover up the initial origin stories, the way that China blocked The World Health Organization from really doing a vigorous investigation, I mean, maybe you can count that as evidence for the lab leak theory that they knew there would be something there that the world would not like to see if the investigation were allowed to go forward unimpeded. But it seems, to me, that I think we were going to be living with this uncertainty for a long time if the FBI and the Energy Department and the other elements of the intelligence community can't agree right now after four years of gathering evidence, I find it hard to believe that there's going to be something in the next four years that is going to break that log jam.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Well, I'd separate your question into two parts and ask when is there going to be a consensus within the US government and then when might that consensus lead to some full international accounting where there is a thorough investigation of the site and there's a report that's made that documents it in a harder way based on direct observation. And the first question, I mean, I would hope that President Biden, again, dislikes the disagreement among his agencies and is pushing them to confer and get to a conclusion. But I would imagine that that's not true. That he probably would rather dodge responsibility for pushing people who might be reluctant to endorse the theory of the lab leak origin and that it will continue to exist as a model. But I do believe that we should, regardless, proceed with trying to garner an international consensus among other governments that also believe that the lab leak theory is likely and put a lot of pressure on China to allow some access, more access, any kind of investigation or any kind of record of what they observed in those early days that can help us really create an answer to this question.
Kyle Peterson: Thank you Mene and Allysia. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast@wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button and we'll be back next week with another edition of Potomac Watch.
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