Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs
"conix conspiracy trip confirmed: The Wuhan Virus Is Not a Lab-Made Bioweapon"
Some analysts are worried that the pressure from senior officials could distort assessments about the coronavirus and be used as a weapon in an escalating battle with China.
Volunteers disinfecting the Qintai Grand Theater in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the coronavirus outbreak began. Aly Song/Reuters
By Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Edward Wong and Adam Goldman
April 30, 2020
WASHINGTON — Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the origin of the coronavirus outbreak, according to current and former American officials. The effort comes as President Trump escalates a public campaign to blame China for the pandemic.
Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found, and scientists who have studied the genetics of the coronavirus say that the overwhelming probability is that it leapt from animal to human in a nonlaboratory setting, as was the case with H.I.V., Ebola and SARS.
And Anthony Ruggiero .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/18/bolton-moves-promote-loyalists-national-security-council/ , the head of the National Security Council’s bureau tracking weapons of mas .. s destruction, expressed frustration during one videoconference in January that the C.I.A. was unable to get behind any theory of the outbreak’s origin. C.I.A. analysts responded that they simply did not have the evidence to support any one theory with high confidence at the time, according to people familiar with the conversation.
Any American intelligence report blaming a Chinese institution and officials for the outbreak could significantly harm relations with China .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/world/asia/us-china-coronavirus.html .. for years to come. And Trump administration officials could use it to try to prod other nations to publicly hold China accountable for coronavirus deaths even when the pandemic’s exact origins cannot be determined.
Mr. Trump made clear on Thursday evening of his interest in intelligence supporting the theory the virus emerged accidentally from a Wuhan lab. In response to a question from a reporter, the president said he had seen intelligence that supported the idea but quickly backtracked, adding that he “was not allowed” to share the intelligence and that his administration was examining multiple theories about the origin of the virus.
[INSERT: Trump is obviously following a GWB Iraq War path here in pressuring intelligence agencies to craft their intelligence to his wishes. There seems to be some question about where Ruggiero stands.]
“There’s a lot of theories,” he said, “but we have people looking at it very, very strongly. Scientific people, intelligence people and others.”
In a statement released earlier on Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the intelligence community “will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Intelligence agencies, the statement said, concur “with the wide scientific consensus that the Covid-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.”
The State Department declined to answer questions about Mr. Pompeo’s role. Spokesmen for the White House and the National Security Council declined to comment.
[Irresponsibility reigns as Trump's political considerations continue to be paramount to the welfare of America.]
A few scientists and national security experts have pointed to a history of lab accidents .. https://my.absa.org/LAI .. infecting researchers to suggest it might have happened in this case, but many scientists have dismissed such theories.
Mr. Trump has spoken publicly about the administration’s “very serious investigations” of the virus’s origin and China’s culpability. Those inquiries took on new urgency in late March, when intelligence officials presented information to the White House that prompted some career officials to reconsider the lab theory. The precise nature of the information, based in part on intercepted communications among Chinese officials, is unclear.
The current and former officials did not say whether Mr. Trump himself, who has shown little regard for the independent judgments of intelligence and law enforcement officials, has pressured the intelligence agencies. But he does want any information supporting the lab theory to set the stage for holding China responsible, according to two people familiar with his thinking. Sign up to receive an email when we publish a new story about the coronavirus outbreak.
He has expressed interest in an idea pushed by Michael Pillsbury .. https://www.hudson.org/experts/724-michael-pillsbury , an informal China adviser to the White House, that Beijing could be sued for damages, with the United States seeking $10 million for every death. At a news conference this week, Mr. Trump said the administration was discussing a “very substantial” reparations claim against China — an idea that Beijing has already denounced .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/world/asia/coronavirus-china-compensation.html .
“President Trump is demanding to know the origins of the virus and what Xi Jinping knew when about the cover-up,” Mr. Pillsbury said.
Looking at the Labs
Several labs in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, research bat viruses and are part of a coordinated global effort to monitor viruses. Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Major gaps remain in what is known about the new pathogen, including which kind of animal infected humans with the coronavirus and where the first transmission took place.
Richard Grenell .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/us/politics/richard-grenell-dni.html , the acting director of national intelligence, has told his agencies to make a priority of determining the virus’s origin. His office convened a review of intelligence officials on April 7 to see whether the agencies could reach a consensus.The officials determined that at least so far, they could not.
Intelligence officials have repeatedly pointed out to the White House that determining the origins of the outbreak is fundamentally a scientific question that cannot be solved easily by spycraft.
A former intelligence official described senior aides’ repeated emphasis of the lab theory as “conclusion shopping,” a disparaging term among analysts that has echoes of the Bush administration’s 2002 push for assessments saying that Iraq had weapons of mass of destruction and links to Al Qaeda, perhaps the most notorious example of the politicization of intelligence.
The C.I.A. has yet to unearth any data beyond circumstantial evidence to bolster the lab theory, according to current and former government officials, and the agency has told policymakers it lacks enough information to either affirm or refute it. Only getting access to the lab itself and the virus samples it contains could provide definitive proof, if it exists, the officials said.
The reason for the change is unclear, but some officials attributed it to the intelligence analyzed in recent weeks. Others took a more jaundiced view: that the agency is trying to curry favor with White House officials. A spokesman for the agency, James M. Kudla, disputed that characterization. “It’s not D.I.A.’s role to make policy decisions or value judgments — and we do not,” he said.
Some American officials have become convinced that Beijing is not sharing all it knows.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is said to have taken the lead in pushing American intelligence agencies for more information on the origin of the virus. Pool photo by Andrew Harnik
“We know that the Chinese Communist Party, when it began to evaluate what to do inside of Wuhan, considered whether the W.I.V. was, in fact, the place where this came from,” said Mr. Pompeo, referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The State Department declined to indicate what was behind his assertion.
Scientists Weigh In
Scientists who study the coronavirus have maintained that the initial spillover from animal to person could have occurred in any number of ways: at a farm where wild animals are raised, through accidental contact with a bat or another animal that carried the virus, or in hunting or transporting animals.
The scientists have also scrutinized the new pathogen’s genes, finding that they show great similarity to bat coronaviruses and bear no hints of human tampering or curation.
He acknowledged that it was theoretically possible that a researcher had found the new virus, fully evolved, in a bat or other animal and taken it into the lab. But, he said, based on the evidence his team gathered and the numerous opportunities for infection in the interactions that many farmers, hunters and others have with wild animals, “there just isn’t a reason to consider the lab as a potential explanation.”
A market in Wuhan has been linked to some of the earliest known cases of the coronavirus.Credit...Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But Richard Ebright, a microbiologist and biosafety expert at Rutgers University, has argued that the probability of a lab accident was “substantial,” pointing to a history of such occurrences that have infected researchers. The Wuhan labs and other centers worldwide that examine naturally occurring viruses have questionable safety rules, he said, adding, “The standards are lax and need to be tightened.”
American officials said they closely watched China’s government this winter for signs of a lab accident but found nothing conclusive. In February, President Xi Jinping stressed the need for a plan to ensure the “biosafety and biosecurity of the country.” And the Ministry of Science and Technology announced new guidelines for laboratories, especially ones handling viruses.
Global Times, a popular state-run newspaper, then published an article .. https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1179747.shtml .. on “chronic inadequate management issues” at laboratories, including problems with biological disposal.
William J. Broad and James Gorman contributed reporting from New York.
Mark Mazzetti is a Washington investigative correspondent, a job he assumed after covering national security from the Washington bureau for 10 years. He was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @MarkMazzettiNYT
Julian E. Barnes is a national security reporter based in Washington, covering the intelligence agencies. Before joining The Times in 2018, he wrote about security matters for The Wall Street Journal. @julianbarnes • Facebook
Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong
Adam Goldman reports on the F.B.I. from Washington and is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. @adamgoldmanNYT
"conix conspiracy trip confirmed: The Wuhan Virus Is Not a Lab-Made Bioweapon"
I can't see an update on this.
June 29, 2020 2.00am AEST
Author Claire Crossan Research Fellow, Virology, Glasgow Caledonian University
Did coronavirus arrive in Spain over a year ago? Alejandro Garcia/EPA
The novel coronavirus – SARS-CoV-2 – may have been in Europe for longer than previously thought. Recent studies have suggested that it was circulating in Italy as early as December 2019. More surprisingly, researchers at the University of Barcelona found traces of the virus when testing untreated wastewater samples dated March 12, 2019.
The study was recently published on a preprint server, medRxiv .. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v1 . The paper is currently being subject to critical review by outside experts in preparation for publication in a scientific journal. Until this process of peer review has been completed, though, the evidence needs to be treated with caution.
So, how was the experiment conducted and what exactly did the scientists find?
One of the early findings about SARS-CoV-2 is that it is found in the faeces .. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jmv.25795 .. of infected people. As the virus makes its way through the gut – where it can cause gastrointestinal symptoms .. https://gut.bmj.com/content/69/6/973 – it loses its outer protein layer, but bits of genetic material called RNA survive the journey intact and are “shed” in faeces. At this point, it is no longer infectious – as far as current evidence tells us. Become a monthly donor and support independent media in Australia.
But the fact that these bits of coronavirus RNA can be found in untreated wastewater (known as “influent”) is useful for tracking outbreaks. Indeed, they can predict where an outbreak is likely to occur a week to ten days before they show up in official figures – the reason being that people shed coronavirus before symptoms become evident. These “pre-symptomatic” people then have to get sick enough to be tested, get the results, and be admitted to a hospital as an official “case”, hence the week or so lag.
Experts around the world are monitoring wastewater for signs of coronavirus. arhendrix/Shutterstock.com
They found evidence of the virus on January 15, 2020, 41 days before the first official case was declared on February 25, 2020. All the samples before this date were negative, except for a sample from March 12, 2019, which gave a positive result in their PCR test for coronavirus. PCR is the standard way of testing .. https://theconversation.com/covid-19-tests-how-they-work-and-whats-in-development-134479 .. to see if someone currently has the disease.
PCR involves getting samples of saliva, mucus, frozen wastewater or whatever else the virus is thought to be lurking in, clearing all the unnecessary stuff out of the sample, then converting the RNA – which is a single strand of genetic material – into DNA (the famous double-stranded helix). The DNA is then “amplified” in successive cycles until key bits of genetic material that are known to only exist in a particular virus are plentiful enough to be detected with a fluorescent probe.
Not highly specific
In coronavirus testing, scientists typically screen for more than one gene. In this case, the researchers tested for three. They had a positive result for the March 2019 sample in one of the three genes tested – the RdRp gene. They screened for two regions of this gene and both were only detected around the 39th cycle of amplification. (PCR tests become less “specific” with increasing rounds of amplification. Scientists generally use 40 to 45 rounds of amplification.)
There are several explanations for this positive result. One is that SARS-CoV-2 is present in the sewage at a very low level. Another is that the test reaction was accidentally contaminated with SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory. This sometimes happens in labs as positive samples are regularly being handled, and it can be difficult to prevent very small traces of positive sample contaminating others.
Another explanation is that there is other RNA or DNA in the sample that resembles the test target site enough for it to give a positive result at the 39th cycle of amplification.
Further tests need to be carried out to conclude that the sample contains SARS-CoV-2, and a finding of that magnitude would need to be replicated separately by independent laboratories.
Reasons to be circumspect
A curious thing about this finding is that it disagrees with epidemiological data about the virus. The authors don’t cite reports of a spike in the number of respiratory disease cases in the local population following the date of the sampling.
Also, we know SARS-CoV-2 to be highly transmissible, at least in its current form. If this result is a true positive it suggests the virus was present in the population at a high enough incidence to be detected in an 800ml sample of sewage, but then not present at a high enough incidence to be detected for nine months, when no control measures were in place.
So, until further studies are carried out, it is best not to draw definitive conclusions.
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