COVID-19: a lab leak?

While speculation circulates that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which had been collecting and manipulating bat viruses, a US government department has stated that the Covid-19 pandemic is most likely to have originated from a laboratory leak.

A Wall Street Journal report this week said that the United States Energy Department had assessed with 'low confidence' the pandemic resulted from an unintended lab leak in China. Four other US agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, believe that the pandemic was likely the result of natural transmission, and two are undecided, the Journal reported.

As the pandemic triggered three years of lockdowns, an estimated six million deaths, and a shattered global economy may all have been caused not by a horrific accident involving food markets and bats, but because a virus broke out of a lab and spread among humans.

China however rejected a new US report that claims the Covid-19 virus may have leaked from a bio laboratory in Wuhan, saying the origins-tracing of the pandemic about science should not be politicised. The CNN reported that the US Department of Energy has estimated in the intelligence report that it does not provide definitive analytic judgment that the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

FBI Director Christopher Wray too has endorsed this theory stating that the bureau believes Covid-19 "most likely" originated in a "Chinese government-controlled lab".

"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident," he told Fox News. It is the first public confirmation of the FBI's classified judgement of how the pandemic virus emerged.

An initial inquiry by the WHO concluded in 2021 that Covid-19 emerged from an animal spillover event, but it was later shown that investigators had been forced to report a lab leak was unlikely to avoid arguments with China. The WHO insists that it is still trying to establish the origins of the pandemic.

Due to Beijing’s refusal to be open with the rest of the world as to what happened and the World Health Organisation’s fumbled investigation which has drawn the concern of  many scientists to wonder if the virus was in fact man-made.