Where Did COVID Come From?
A final look.
It has been a busy summer filled with indictments of former presidents and other folks, and because of that, I think a major news story got overlooked in the process. I will break it down here, and then return to you in September. Suavemente.
If you are a long-time reader of The Jackal, you will probably recall that I have been agnostic on the origins of COVID-19. I’ve tried to share every article out there that produces evidence of a lab leak, and was on the record very early (May 2020!) saying that a lab leak was totally possible, and too many people were discounting it as an origin of COVID.
But it’s been really quiet on that front for a while. That is possibly because COVID is very much in the rear-view mirror, to the point where even elevated case levels (right now) are not causing any grave concerns. 99% of those feelings are because we have a bunch of highly effective vaccines, but I also think most people don’t care. After all, who wants to have more debates about COVID?
However, I still think the discussions about COVID’s origins are fascinating. That is partly because I think epidemiology and virology are wild and fun to think about, but also because it is an area where there are genuine levels of disagreement in good faith, and there are few other topics like that actively being discussed. You can also throw in China’s penchant for deceiving foreign governments or (in many cases) outright lying to them, but some of it is because we genuinely don’t know how COVID got its start!
But in July we got nudged very heavily in a certain direction. Last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its report on COVID’s origins and all but killed the lab leak theory. That’s the headline. If you want to stop reading now, that can be your takeaway: The Intelligence Community of the United States basically said a lab leak of COVID-19 is impossible. But if you want to go deeper (and it gets a lot deeper and more nuanced than that), keep reading.
Wait. Why wasn’t this big news?
Before we get into the report itself, I want to give some background into why the ODNI report was supposed to be a story, but then fizzled out. In June 2023, a few Twitter dudes - namely Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi - who were given the “Twitter files” by Elon Musk, broke (what they said was) a major story: The first people who were infected with COVID were lab workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). That is/was big news! It would be a definitive, major link between the WIV and COVID-19, right out there in the wild. After Taibbi and Shellenberger released their information, it produced takes like this:
Here is Shellenberger himself in the New York Post:
What’s more, this week my colleagues Matt Taibbi, Alex Gutentag, and I broke the explosive story that the first three people sickened by the virus were the scientists experimenting with SARS-like coronaviruses.
Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab.
When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, before the virus spread around the world, we were told, “100%.”
The Wall Street Journal later confirmed Shellenberger and Taibbi’s reporting, leading many people to conclude that the lab leak theory was all but proven. All we needed was the ODNI report, which would quickly show us that the first people who were infected with COVID-19 were working at the WIV and BAM, that is how COVID started. IN THE LAB.
The problem? The ODNI report didn’t say that. In fact, it said the opposite.
OK, then what does the report say?
I will give you a link to the whole thing right here, while also telling you I’m about to break it down in little human terms, with lots of pictures (this is how I learn things more gooder), so stick with me.
1. The first people to catch COVID-19 did not work at the lab.
This directly rebuts Shellenberger and Taibbi’s points above. Here is the ODNI:
The ODNI outlines that while some people at the lab got sick, it was with other, seasonal stuff and not COVID. In the last paragraph, you can see that WIV officials tested negative for COVID antibodies, which would have been impossible if they had caught COVID from the lab.
That said, there is another, important part of the report in that screenshot: The ODNI says the information “neither supports nor refutes” the natural origin theory or the lab leak theory. That is repeated throughout the report. Like I said above, I am not sure we will ever figure this out 100%, but the ODNI report definitely pushes readers in a certain direction. Let’s keep going.
2. More U.S. intelligence agencies believe COVID-19 originated in nature.
Earlier this year, it was big news that the FBI concluded with a “moderate” degree of certainty that COVID-19 originated from the WIV. It then became even bigger news when the Department of Energy concluded1 that COVID-19 originated from a lab, but not the WIV (Yes, two different labs!).2 Here is the ODNI on what everyone in the Intelligence Community thinks:
The last point is pretty key, since a huge part of the debate around COVID-19 is whether or not it is the product of “gain of function” research. The ODNI says it is not, meaning that it was a naturally occurring virus even if it was the result of a lab leak.
3. The WIV did not have a precursor to COVID-19 or COVID-19 itself in its lab prior to December 2019.
This is super important. Here is the ODNI:
I think this all but debunks the lab leak theory. To put this in simple terms, the ODNI says that the first time the WIV possessed COVID-19 in its lab is in late December 2019, weeks after the first cases were reported. This is them saying, “COVID did not leak from WIV,” without explicitly saying it. As the ODNI states throughout their report, it is possible that COVID originated from another lab (see my footnotes!), but the likelihood that it originated from the WIV is slim to none.
OK, seriously. This is pretty big news. Why isn’t anyone talking about it?
I am usually the first nerd to say, “WELL AKCTUALLYYY [story X] did get significant media attention, and here are six newspapers that covered it.” But I will concede this didn’t make headlines. In fact, the “low” and “moderate” confidence stories from the Department of Energy and FBI (respectively) got way more press coverage than the ODNI report.
I think part of this is because most Americans already have their opinions baked in: An overwhelming majority think COVID originated from a lab. If that’s the case, it’s fair to ask why a random ODNI report should generate that much coverage (media should obviously cover it anyway).
But I also think some of this speaks to the complicated nature of the lab leak theory. From a 1,000 ft view, it makes perfect sense: The virus originated in Wuhan, and the WIV studies viruses, and is located in Wuhan. It should be open and shut, right? But I think that mostly speaks to a Western (and particularly American) misunderstanding of giant Asian cities.
I’m ready for some geography of central China.
Wuhan is huge. It is bigger than New York City. It has a population of just over 12 million people, and it is 3,279 square miles. It is bigger than Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston combined. In fact, in terms of land mass, it is almost double the combined square mile radius of those cities. It is massive.
Now that you have that picture in your head, I want you to cram something else in there: There is a definitive, no debate-at-all argument that a cluster of cases emerged at the Wuhan wet market in December 2019. Multiple vendors got sick, and so did their family members. It spread out from there and infected hospital workers treating those people, and continued to ballon.
So, let’s break this down. Here are definitive facts about what we know:
The first cluster of cases emerged at the Huanan Wet Market in Wuhan.
The WIV is located across the Yangtze River.
These two places are separated by not only a river, but a 45 minute drive and 13 miles of roadway.
Think of it this way: Picture yourself in Manhattan, staring up at the Empire State Building. If you want to understand how far the distance is between the wet market and the WIV, the New York Botanical Gardens - roughly 13 miles from your location and in a totally separate borough - is a good spot to think of.
If you are a Denverite like myself, the distance between the wet market and the WIV is the same as the distance between Broncos Stadium and Golden, Colorado. It’s that far.
The lab-leak theory argues that the virus made a jump from the WIV to the wet markets, and it traveled this distance (13 miles) without causing a cluster of cases anywhere else in Wuhan, and did not infect any of the lab workers’ family members or close friends.
Again, I want to stress this, it is reasonable to conclude that COVID-19 leaked from a lab, before looking at the ODNI report or any other evidence. But Wuhan is not a tiny city, and if that is your working theory of how COVID-19 emerged on the planet, you are leaving a lot of logical holes that need to be filled.
Cool. Does this matter?
I’ll say this: It is neat that the U.S. intelligence community is now starting to link up with the scientific consensus about COVID’s origins, which is that COVID was a naturally occurring virus that got transferred from a bat to another mammal, and it spread from the wet market.3
However, I honestly don’t think we will ever get a definitive answer. China is too secretive, and some of this evidence is too hard to study. Maybe the Department of Energy is right (please read the footnotes) that COVID emerged from a different lab, but if that theory turns out to be true, it still means that we would have been dealing with COVID anyway.
On the other hand, I do think it matters given that giant conspiracies have taken over public discourse in America and done real damage. Because of the lab-leak theory and general misunderstandings about gain-of-function research, Senator Rand Paul seriously wants to put Anthony Fauci in prison. Never mind the fact that Fauci has never dismissed the lab-leak theory, and even said in early 2021 that the possibility “certainly exists” that it originated from one of the labs in Wuhan. Fauci is a conservative pariah and an easy target, so he has to be sacrificed.
This is all part of a large, spider web of conspiracies that range from QAnon to the COVID-19 vaccines being the Mark of the Beast™. The idea that COVID was some leaked bioweapon on us to get rid of Donald Trump was foisted on the general public in the summer of 2020, and it has not shrunk since then.4
It has led to giant swaths of vaccine skepticism and an outright denial of the benefits of the COVID vaccine, which are myriad. This has had deadly effects, all in the name of politics. A study from last month mirrored what others have been finding for the past year, which is that excess deaths are elevated in counties that had lower rates of COVID-19 vaccination. When broken down across Party lines, more Republicans are dying from COVID-19 than Democrats. Chuck Todd (somewhat morbidly) broke down the effect this will have on future elections, and it is sobering.
I have spent a lot of time writing about why this makes me angry. The proliferation of grifting, in particular, often sucks me into a whirlwind of sadness. But that’s partly why I felt compelled to write this post. Even after reading the ODNI report, I still don’t know where COVID came from, but I know how to follow the evidence, and it points away from the conspiracies.
Sometimes, that’s enough. See you after Labor Day.
I’m using generic terms for easier reading, but in intelligence circles, it is rare for anyone to “conclude” anything without hard evidence. “Low” confidence means it is essentially guesswork with some supportive evidence, and even “moderate” confidence means there is a lot of conflicting evidence. If you want a full breakdown of these terms, click here.
The Department of Energy has low confidence that COVID-19 emerged from the Chinese Center for Disease Control, which makes more sense than the WIV. However, there is no gain-of-function research being conducted at the Chinese Center for Disease Control, which means COVID-19 was 100% naturally occurring. In other words, we would have been dealing with it anyway!
If you want an easier-to-read version, the study’s author breaks it down in this thread.
Worth noting that the scam film “Plandemic” that was put together by a bunch of grifters immediately posited that there was a lab “origin” of COVID, but they say it originated in the U.S. (specifically a research facility in North Carolina), which just so happened to link up with the claims coming from Chinese Community Party at the time. Funny coincidence!
Footnote 4. Wow.