The “lab leak” as a source of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 had been negated twice over by the World Health Organization-convened expert team that had labelled the theory as “highly unlikely”.

But that did not stop the rumblings of disbelief from certain scientific and political quarters that believed that a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the virus and not the wet-market in the area that reportedly sold live and endangered animals for meat.

Biden orders IC

In perhaps the most significant voice yet on the issue, United States President Joe Biden has asked his intelligence community “to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” and report in three months.

“Back in early 2020, when Covid-19 emerged, I called for the CDC to get access to China to learn about the virus so we could fight it more effectively. The failure to get our inspectors on the ground in those early months will always hamper any investigation into the origin of Covid-19,” the US President said.

The US intelligence community (IC) had already been tasked with the job, he said, to check whether the virus had emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory. And the current position was, he said, “that two elements in the IC leans toward the former scenario and one leans more toward the latter – each with low or moderate confidence – the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.”

WHO draws flak

While former US President Trump and other American officials had thrown their weight behind the “lab leak” theory, the WHO’s expert team had said, it was “highly unlikely”. After the WHO team’s first briefing from Wuhan received much flak for negating the lab leak option, WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus had said that “all hypotheses remain on the table”.

In a later briefing, experts pointed to leads on possible infections way back in October 2019 and references to possible sources in China, outside of Wuhan — which the world came to recognise as Ground-Zero of the pandemic. The first official identification of the virus is dated only in December 2019. They also spoke of difficulties in accessing raw data and said asymptomatic cases may have been off radar.

Adding to the intrigue, recent media reports suggest that researchers had been hospitalised with Covid-like symptoms. While China has refuted these theories, the world will be tuning in three months on, to know if it has indeed got any closer to understanding the source of the virus that has taken a high global toll.

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