The long-awaited report released [June 23] by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put the lie to the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, leaked from a virology lab in Wuhan, China, where the disease was first detected in humans.
The lab-leak conspiracists were certain that the report would validate their contentions, for which there has never been any valid scientific evidence.
Instead it did just the opposite.
The report specifically addresses two supposedly key pieces of evidence promoted by the lab-leak camp. One is that several WIV researchers fell ill in fall 2019 with COVID — in other words, that the virus was rampant in the lab well before it reached the outside community.
This claim has always been rather squirrelly. Its most assiduous promoter, the Wall Street Journal, has acknowledged that the illness was “either COVID-19 or a seasonal illness.” (November, when they supposedly got sick, is flu season, after all.)
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The report says there’s no evidence that WIV possessed samples of SARS-CoV-2 or any close relative, prior to the pandemic outbreak, when it began working on SARS-CoV-2. Two viruses that the institute was known to be working on — and which conspiracy theorists assert could have been manipulated into SARS-CoV-2 — are not “close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to be a direct progenitor.”
