NEW from @yabutaleb7 and me. Inside the Trump administration's hunt for a pandemic "lab leak." washingtonpost.com/national-secur… Here's some of what we found:
On Feb. 1, 2020, a group of top experts convened via teleconference in the first known effort by senior U.S. and international health officials to determine whether human engineering or a laboratory leak might explain the emergence of the virus.
The scientists eventually concluded there was no evidence the virus was manipulated in a lab. But at the State Department, the White House, and in the intelligence community, officials continued searching for the pandemic's origins.
“We never got to a smoking gun, which perhaps most people are focused on,” said Anthony Ruggiero, who was the NSC senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense in the Trump administration. “We were trying to do an all-source review of the information that’s out there."
But Trump was convinced--"100 percent sure," a former official said--that the virus came from a lab in Wuhan. Privately, he told aides that he believed the intelligence agencies had also come to that conclusion. They had not.
U.S. intelligence agencies searched for a patient zero, but came up empty. Much of the info they relied on was from public sources. Of the classified info stream, a significant amount came from foreign governments.
Sec. of State Mike Pompeo was especially focused on finding the virus' origin and keyed in on a lab leak. But there was no clear evidence of one. “He wanted a smoking gun, and we couldn’t give it to him,” one former official said.
A State Dept. bureau that monitors compliance with arms treaties took up the hunt, on the idea that the virus could have been the result of a secret Chinese bioweapons program.
Their work led to a "fact sheet," released in the last days of the Trump administration, that the Biden administration has never walked back. It included intel about sick workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Some Trump administration officials wanted to declare that China was in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention, despite a lack of evidence to support such an explosive claim.
Now Biden has ordered a fresh review of intel that might help determine the pandemic's origins. Several former officials said they believe there may be new intelligence that wasn't examined in the previous administration.
NIH Director Francis Collins put the onus on the Chinese government to allow a more thorough inspection, and to answer questions about the sick lab workers. “If they really want to be exonerated from this claim of culpability, then they have got to be transparent.”
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