A classified intelligence report recently delivered to Congress included the Energy Department's assessment that it is “likely” that Covid-19 first spread after a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, two sources with direct knowledge told NBC News.
That’s likely to be a major topic of conversation for the first hearing of the House Oversight Committee’s new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Tuesday’s roundtable ostensibly will focus on speaking to doctors about policy decisions made during the crisis, but the panel’s Republican members are sure to highlight the lab leak theory. Despite their likely enthusiasm, though, the Energy Department assessment is not the smoking gun they’ve been hunting for the last three years.
The Energy Department assessment is not the smoking gun Republicans have been hunting for the last three years.
The prevailing theory is that the coronavirus that causes the disease known as Covid-19 first emerged in a Wuhan market where live animals were sold. This thesis has been published in multiple credible sources, including the journal Science last year. The lab leak theory, on the other hand, posits that the virus was a version of the SARS coronavirus that was studied and/or manipulated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology before escaping. There is substantially less evidence available to back that theory, but the U.S. intelligence community still cautions that “there is not a definitive answer,” as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told CNN on Sunday.
(A spokesperson for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs seemed to reject the Energy Department's reported findings, saying that "relevant sides should stop hyping up the lab leak theory and stop smearing China and politicizing the origin tracing issue.")
For those curious as to why the Energy Department has any skin in the game here, its Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is one of the 18 offices and agencies that make up the intelligence community, alongside more recognizable names like the FBI and CIA. With a network of 17 laboratories to oversee and protect, the Energy Department has insights and potential sources that the other IC members may lack.
But it’s very much worth noting that the department lab leak determination was made with “low confidence,” according to NBC News reporting. According to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, that rating “generally means that the information’s credibility and/or plausibility is questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.”
Importantly, while new information reportedly caused the Energy Department to change its views, The Wall Street Journal reported, other agencies aren't following suit. It and the FBI are reportedly now the outliers among those that have looked into the pandemic's origins with the latter determining with “moderate confidence” that the lab leak theory is the most likely source.
The hedging on that front is unlikely to matter to the House GOP-led subcommittee on the pandemic. That panel is already replicating work from the last Congress, which also featured a select subcommittee on the Covid crisis. But a major reason why this subcommittee exists is in response to the swirl of Covid-related conspiracy theories that the Republican base has been fed for years now.
Baked into many of those theories is an intense hatred for Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In that role, he was positioned to oversee NIH grants for research into how zoonotic pathogens can make the leap from animals to people. (The NIH has denied accusations that those grants supported “‘gain-of-function’ research on coronaviruses that would have increased their transmissibility or lethality for humans.”) That, combined with his frequent media appearances warning about the dangers of Covid during the pandemic, has made Fauci a perfect shadowy figure to populate numerous dark conspiracy theories.
Part of what makes the lab leak theory so appealing is that it gives adherents someone or something to blame for the fear, death and chaos of 2020.
But there’s a major logical leap needed to go from “Covid likely first escaped from a lab” to “Fauci oversaw a plot to increase government control over average Americans.” There’s a similar gap between the idea of any lab leak being an accident, as the Energy Department’s assessment reportedly claims, and the idea that “COVID-19 may have been tied to China’s bioweapons research program,” as the new panel’s chair, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, has previously suggested. While the Energy Department’s new conclusion is worth considering, it does not automatically give credence to the more outlandish — and dangerous — theories out there.
It seems to me that part of what makes the lab leak theory so appealing is that it gives adherents someone or something to blame for the fear, death and chaos of 2020. After all, there’s a reason why similar theses have circulated for everything from AIDS to the Ebola virus. The lack of certainty, and China’s shadiness before, during and after the original outbreak, makes it easy to fill in the blanks with a vast conspiratorial cover-up. I can almost see why that sort of purposeful malice is somehow less terrifying than “this thing that killed millions globally evolved naturally — and another thing like it could do the same.”
The latter would suggest that it’s all the more important to continue zoonotic pathogen research to foresee future pandemic threats — the same kind of research that is now under attack. Likewise, you would assume that determining as best as possible the full origins of Covid would be a bipartisan endeavor, one based more on national security than on scoring political points. Tragically, Republicans have ensured that is not the case. Whatever evidence the Energy Department has acquired will be weaponized as virulent misinformation instead.
