Spies just killed the lab leak theory (for now)

Last week was supposed to be a big one in the hunt for the origins of the pandemic. It marked the end of a 90-day period, mandated by Congress and signed into law by President Biden, in which U.S. intelligence agencies were required to declassify “any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and the emergence of COVID-19.

Anticipation was stoked further when a Substack newsletter, authored by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag, reported that the declassified documents might confirm longstanding rumors that WIV workers had fallen ill with COVID in November 2019. Specifically, the bloggers claimed that they would show that one of the allegedly sick workers had been working with “the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it” just before he got infected.

That post, based on the word of anonymous U.S. government officials, went viral thanks to a boost from the Murdoch media conglomerate including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Another Murdoch paper, the Times of London, published a separate article that claimed, based on a similarly anonymous U.S. source, that one of the lab workers’ relatives had gotten sick and died. In sum, as the bloggers wrote, it would prove that the WIV workers were the “patients zero” of the pandemic.

Well, on Friday, at news-dump-o’clock, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence finally issued the long-anticipated report. Reading it, you could almost hear the air going out of the room at the Shellengberger, Taibbi, and Murdoch residences.

Here’s what the ODNI said about the sick workers (my emphases):

While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19.

The report added:

We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19. One researcher may have been hospitalized in this timeframe for treatment of a non-respiratory medical condition.

Whoops. And nothing about an infected relative either.

What about the virus? Did the spies find that the lab had samples of SARS-CoV-2 — or something that could have, with a few tweaks (or the insertion of, say, a furin cleavage site) become SARS-CoV-2 — before the pandemic?

They did not:

We assess that some scientists at the WIV have genetically engineered coronaviruses using common laboratory practices. The IC has no information, however, indicating that any WIV genetic engineering work has involved SARS-CoV-2, a close progenitor, or a backbone virus that is closely-related enough to have been the source of the pandemic.

OK, OK, so maybe Shellenberger & Co. got all of that wrong. Maybe their anonymous U.S. government sour