Thread by @JoshRosenau

The areas of disagreement in the IC will surely generate more discussion, but important to emphasize the common ground among intelligence agencies’ assessment of #OriginsOfCovid. This should reasonably bracket future discussions. odni.gov/index.php/news…

✅ Emergence no later than November.
✅ First outbreak in December.
❌ Not genetically engineered.
❌ Not a bioweapon.
❌ No prior knowledge by officials of its emergence.

I suppose that doesn’t rule out knowledge between emergence and the first outbreak.

This rules out the idea, circulating in the weirder corners of “lab leak” world, that the Military World Games were the site of an outbreak in October-November 2019.

There is disagreement among agencies about natural zoonosis vs a lab escape of some sort. Most agencies with an opinion favor natural zoonosis. They do so with “low confidence,” which reflects that there’s no firm evidence of how that happened.

One intelligence agency (unnamed, alas) expresses “moderate” confidence that the virus first reached humans as a result of something “laboratory-associated.” The summary doesn’t explain why that agency has higher confidence yet other agencies don’t even assign it low confidence.

It does explain that some agencies put more weight on scientific publications.

I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing they released more details on what evidence the agencies relied on. At least open source and unclassified materials should be possible to list, and perhaps some indication of how they assessed or weighted those pieces of evidence.

I agree that we should want more openness from China in what they know already. I take the last sentence here to be a warning about what diplomatic approaches are more and less likely to get the cooperation we want.

Floating wild and evidenceless allegations seems like it would enhance “frustration that the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China.” If so, the saber-rattling of lab leakers would make the investigation they purport to want *less* likely.