“An updated intelligence assessment about the origins of the Covid-19 virus has reopened the long-simmering and unsolved debate about how the virus came to be,” CNN reported on Monday, February 27, 2023 (read story here).
“[T]he US Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is now the second tentacle of the US government intelligence apparatus, along with the FBI, that endorses the ‘lab leak theory’,” CNN said.
Fine, but that’s just an agency’s opinion, and hardly definitive.
Another item causing a stir is a January 19, 2023 article in The Nation (read it here) describing scientists’ discussions among themselves about the origin of the virus. All that reveals is researchers kicked around theories and didn’t want their speculations made public because they didn’t want to provide fodder for conspiracy theories. That article ends with,
“As the search for that origin continues, both in Congress and in the scientific community, it is unclear whether dispositive evidence to support either the lab or natural origin theory will ever emerge. Georgetown’s Lawrence Gostin, for his part, is not optimistic, noting that the Chinese government has foreclosed the possibility of a rigorous, transparent, and independent investigation into the emergence of the virus in Wuhan. ‘I think it is extraordinarily sad for humankind that we probably will never know for sure,’ he said.”
The next time someone tries to tell you the lab-origin theory has finally been proved, tell them this or that agency’s intelligence assessment is not “proof,” it’s just another group of observers weighing in with their speculations, and the fact is we don’t know where Covid-19 came from.