The doubts about China and the origin of the covid-19 1:43
(CNN) -
A classified report, edited last year, warning that the covid-19 pandemic may have leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan has re-emerged as a focal point with lawmakers trying to reignite the search for answers.
The report, which was issued by researchers at the government-backed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in May 2020, found it was possible that the new coronavirus was escaping from a laboratory in Wuhan, according to four people familiar with the document, at a time when that this line of investigation was considered politically taboo.
It is unclear how influential the document's findings were in advancing the government's understanding of the origins of the virus, or whether the document influenced a latent debate about whether the type of research being done on coronaviruses in the lab could have contributed. to the creation of covid-19.
The report also found that the virus could have developed naturally - echoing what the intelligence community now says it believes - and multiple sources familiar with the document downplayed it.
But the report has gained new political power on Capitol Hill, as the possibility that the pandemic emerged from research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has gained widespread legitimacy in recent months.
The document has been quietly available to key legislators on Capitol Hill since last year, according to two sources in Congress.
But some Republicans on Capitol Hill are expressing frustration at not having access to the document sooner.
Republican members of the Energy and Commerce Commission have lobbied the Department of Energy in recent weeks for more information on the report, which is classified as "confidential."
"I think a lot of us think that various oversight committees probably should have heard about [the report] a little earlier," said Rep. Morgan Griffith, a Republican from Virginia who sits on the House of Commerce and Energy Committee. Representatives.
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Republicans on the panel have been conducting their own investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and have also requested additional documents from the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of State.
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"[Livermore] is one of the places we want to get answers from because we think they have a bigger piece of the puzzle than we originally thought in March," Griffith said.
Sinclair Broadcast Group was the first to report the document's existence.
A year after its first publication, the report now matters not so much for what it reveals, but because it offered some early support for the theory that the virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan at a time when, at least publicly, the The intelligence community claimed that it believed the virus was not "man-made" and likely originated naturally.
Meanwhile, two former officials close to the Trump administration's investigations into the origins of the pandemic say Livermore's report wasn't discovered by lawmakers investigating the matter until months after it was produced, raising the specter of what some Former officials have called the "deep state" of career bureaucrats who inappropriately bury information that validated the Trump administration's political activities.
Still, other Congressional officials familiar with the report, including those supporting an investigation into the lab leak theory, say the Energy Commission Republicans are touting their findings now as a purely political ploy meant to validate Trump, whose defense of the lab leak theory they say politicized the search for the origins of COVID-19.
An official with the House Intelligence Committee said the panel had already reviewed the document as part of its investigation and two other congressional staff members said lawmakers from at least two other committees had previously had access to the document. document information and were briefed on their findings last year. It is unclear if lawmakers from the Energy and Commerce Commission were among those who knew of the report.
Several sources have warned CNN that the document does not offer any "irrefutable evidence" proving one theory over the other.
The report largely reaches the same conclusion that the intelligence community has publicly revealed in recent weeks, according to several people familiar with it.
That is, the zoonotic theory of the origins of the virus and the theory of laboratory leaks are plausible.
But it offers some circumstantial evidence to support the theory of laboratory leakage, validating what was then considered a fringe notion.
Republicans are pressuring the administration to declassify more information that the US government already has that could help scientists and public health experts move closer to an answer.
The Department of Energy, which oversees Livermore and the other National Laboratories, briefed House Commerce and Energy Commission staff last week on the report, according to two people familiar with the classified session, and the panel is now pushing for that more complete information is provided to all members.
The Labs, a collection of 17 elite scientific research facilities, will play a key role in the 90-day intelligence review on the origins of the covid that President Joe Biden publicly announced last month, a White House official told CNN.
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Congressional interest in the Livermore report comes as the Biden administration and the scientific community have publicly said that there is a legitimate possibility that the new coronavirus has escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, leaving Republicans, who have long advanced. time that theory, feeling vindicated.
For much of 2020, following the theory of lab leaks was publicly treated as xenophobic and, thanks in part to an open letter signed by 27 scientists and published in an influential medical journal in February 2020, scientifically flawed.
But in recent months, classified intelligence has emerged that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who were conducting the kind of controversial research that some scientists now believe may have led to the pandemic, fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the outbreak was known to have started.
It was also made public that the open letter, whose signers wrote at the time that they "strongly condemn conspiracy theories that suggest that covid-19 does not have a natural origin," was not only signed but organized by a scientist involved in funding. the kind of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that other scientists now believe could have generated SARS-Cov-2.
Several of the scientists involved have since said that they believe that research into the origins of the pandemic should include the possibility of a laboratory leak, and increasingly the academic community has begun offering publications presenting evidence to support that theory. .
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Various sources in Congress lamented the degree to which the lab leak theory was absorbed into politics at the time, with some arguing that Trump's public support for that hypothesis actually hampered his investigation as a serious line of inquiry. At the time, critics argued that Trump was pushing the theory as a way to deflect the blame for the rising death toll in his handling of the pandemic and put it on China, instantly tarnishing the objectivity of any effort to test that hypothesis. His xenophobic language around the virus, calling it "kung flu," further stigmatized the investigation.
But former Trump administration officials now say their interest in that theory has been justified as serious, rather than politically motivated, and that their efforts to investigate the matter were hampered by public health agencies as well as the community of intelligence.
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Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who publicly defended the lab leak hypothesis while in office, told Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Thursday that the National Institutes of Health "were trying to crack down" on the efforts of the State Department to investigate the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“It was a good job from the State Department team.
We overcome a lot of internal bureaucracy, "Pompeo said.
"There were people throughout the [intelligence] community who just didn't want to talk about this, who wanted to focus on other things," Pompeo said later in the interview.
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In April 2020, a month before the production of the Livermore report, the intelligence community released a rare statement saying that while it would continue to investigate the origins of the virus, it “coincides with the broad scientific consensus that the covid- 19 was not man-made or genetically modified. '
As of spring 2020, two small groups of Trump administration officials were conducting parallel investigations into the origins of the virus: one at the State Department and another at the direction of the National Security Council responsible for biodefense.
Officials involved in both reviews now say their efforts to test the validity of the lab leak theory met with pushback from the intelligence community.
"We were asking very direct questions," said a former Trump official, who said his efforts were "undervalued."
At the time, some critics internally viewed the State Department effort as a politicized effort to select the facts in order to test a favorite theory for the president, CNN previously reported.
Officials involved in the parallel efforts insist they weren't predisposed to one outcome or the other.
"We weren't putting on our tinfoil hats and jumping around and saying, 'This must be a lab leak!'" Said Anthony Ruggiero, Senior Director of Biodefense for the National Security Council under the Trump administration.
"We were saying, 'What's wrong with these things here?'"
Republican lawmakers investigating the matter, including seeking more information on Livermore's report, also insist that their interest is in the truth, not a predetermined conclusion.
If you lead us to a bat, that's fine!
Personally, I think it's more likely a lab accident, ”Griffith said.
“I don't think any agency has a good enough image to tell the story.
That's our job: putting all those pieces together, so I think the American people have a pretty good idea of what's going on. "
CNN's Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.
Covid-19 Laboratory
