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We want to know what led to this, so we can hopefully try and prevent something similar from happening in the future.
Those words, from Dr. David Relman, an infectious disease expert and microbiologist at Stanford University, reflected the national conversation around the origins of Covid-19 in 2021.
Did it come from a lab? Was it a zoonotic transfer? Something else? Surely, with time, an answer would become clear.
But now, three years removed from the start of a pandemic that is still disrupting daily life, an assessment from the US Energy Department is only adding to the confusion about what really happened in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
The department has assessed that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak in China, according to a newly updated classified intelligence report first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Yet two sources said that the department assessed in the intelligence report that it had low confidence that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, CNNs Jeremy Herb and Natasha Bertrand reported.
Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence; and a low confidence assessment generally means that the information obtained is not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan acknowledged on CNNs State of the Union on Sunday that the intelligence community is divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.
The intelligence community has been split on the matter for years.
For the better part of 2020, advocates of the lab leak theory had to fight against claims they were being xenophobic or racist in part thanks to anti-Chinese rhetoric from then-President Donald Trump, who embraced the theory.
An inquiry launched by Trumps State Department, which sought to investigate whether Chinas biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemics origin in Wuhan, was shut down early on in the Biden administration.
A letter from public health experts published in February 2020 in The Lancet, an influential scientific journal, also set the tone early by declaring the virus to have a natural origin.
But the lab leak theory has gained more traction with time, especially following reports that the intelligence community found evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill with a mysterious virus in November 2019 although its not clear whether they contracted Covid-19 and no further evidence has emerged to corroborate that report.
By July 2021, senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins believed that the lab leak theory was at least as credible as the possibility that the virus emerged naturally in the wild a dramatic shift from a year earlier, when Democrats publicly downplayed such an idea.
The latest intelligence assessment was provided to Congress as Republicans on Capitol Hill have been pushing for further investigation into the theory, while accusing the Biden administration of playing down its possibility.
House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul said Sunday he was pleased the Energy Department has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to. (The Texas Republican had released a 2021 report that concluded that the preponderance of the evidence showed the pandemic originated with a leak from the Wuhan lab.)
Now is the time for the entire Biden administration to join the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the majority of Americans by publicly concluding what common sense told us at the start the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, McCaul said in a statement.
Sullivan said Sunday that Biden had directed the national laboratories, which are part of the Department of Energy, to be brought into the assessment.
Right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question, Sullivan told CNNs Dana Bash.
Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just dont have enough information to be sure.
So where does that leave us? Not far from where we started.
Past pandemics have emerged from natural transmission through animals, and it often takes months or years to discover the host that the virus passed through as it adapted to infect humans.
In some cases, as in Ebola, the original natural source has never been identified. And its been more than 40 years since the first cases of Ebola.
So why does it matter where Covid-19 came from? As Relman, the Stanford microbiologist, previously noted to CNN, finding the answer can help prevent the next pandemic.
WASHINGTON New intelligence has prompted the Energy Department to conclude that an accidental laboratory leak in China most likely caused the coronavirus pandemic, though U.S. spy agencies remain divided over the origins of the virus, American officials said on Sunday.
The conclusion was a change from the departments earlier position that it was undecided on how the virus emerged.
Some officials briefed on the intelligence said that it was relatively weak and that the Energy Departments conclusion was made with low confidence, suggesting its level of certainty was not high. While the department shared the information with other agencies, none of them changed their conclusions, officials said.
Officials would not disclose what the intelligence was. But many of the Energy Departments insights come from its network of national laboratories, some of which conduct biological research, rather than more traditional forms of intelligence like spy networks or communications intercepts.
Intelligence officials believe the scrutiny of the pandemics beginnings could be important to improving global response to future health crises, though they caution that finding an answer about the source of the virus may be difficult or even impossible given Chinese opposition to further research. Scientists say there is a responsibility to explain how a pandemic that has killed almost seven million people started, and learning more about its origins could help researchers understand what poses the biggest threats of future outbreaks.
The new intelligence and the shift in the departments view was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, declined to confirm the intelligence. But he said President Biden had ordered that the national labs be brought into the effort to determine the origins of the outbreak so that the government was using every tool it had.
In addition to the Energy Department, the F.B.I. has also concluded, with moderate confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses. Four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, with low confidence, that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission, the director of national intelligences office announced in October 2021.
Mr. Sullivan said those divisions remain.
There is a variety of views in the intelligence community, he said on CNNs State of the Union on Sunday. Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just dont have enough information to be sure.
Mr. Sullivan said if more information was learned, the administration would report it to Congress and the public. But right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question, he said.
Some scientists believe that the current evidence, including virus genes, points to a large food and live animal market in Wuhan as the most likely place the coronavirus emerged.
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Leaders of the intelligence community are set to brief Congress on March 8 and 9 as part of annual hearings on global threats. Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, and other senior officials would most likely be asked about the continuing inquiry into the viruss origins.
How the pandemic began has become a divisive line of intelligence reporting, and recent congressional reports have not been bipartisan.
Many Democrats have not been persuaded by the lab leak hypothesis, with some saying they believe the natural causes explanation and others saying they are not certain that enough intelligence will emerge to draw a conclusion.
But many Republicans on Capitol Hill have said they believe the virus could have come from one of Chinas research labs in Wuhan. A congressional subcommittee, created when Republicans took over the House in January, has made examining the lab leak theory a central focus of its work. It is expected to convene the first of a series of hearings in March.
Evidence has been piling up for over a year in favor of the lab leak hypothesis, said Representative Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and leads a new House committee on China. I am glad some of our agencies are starting to listen to common sense and change their assessment.
On Tuesday, Mr. Gallagher will hold the new committees first hearing, looking at the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the United States. Future hearings, Mr. Gallagher said, will look at biosecurity and Chinas efforts to influence international organizations like the World Health Organization.
Where our committee can have a role is teasing out what this communicates about the DNA of the Chinese Communist Party, an organization that was willing to cover up the origins of the pandemic and thereby cost us critical days, months and weeks and millions of lives in the process, Mr. Gallagher said in an interview on Sunday.
Chinese officials have repeatedly called the lab leak hypothesis a lie that has no basis in science and is politically motivated.
Early in the Biden administration, the president ordered the intelligence agencies to investigate the pandemics origins, after criticism of a W.H.O. report on the matter. While there was material that had not been thoroughly examined by intelligence officials, the review ultimately did not yield any new consensus inside the agencies.
The March 2021 report by the W.H.O. said it was extremely unlikely that the virus emerged accidentally from a lab. But China appointed half the scientists who wrote the report and exerted major control over it. American officials have been largely dismissive of that work.
The intelligence agencies have said they do not believe there is any evidence that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 was created deliberately as a biological weapon. But they have said that whether it emerged naturally, perhaps from a market in Wuhan, or escaped accidentally from a lab is the subject of legitimate debate.
Anthony Ruggiero, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former National Security Council staff member focusing on biodefense issues during the Trump administration, said he believed China is still hiding crucial information about how the virus emerged. He said the lab leak theory should not be dismissed.
The lab leak origin for the Covid-19 pandemic is not, and was not, a conspiracy theory, he said.
Benjamin Mueller and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
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