US Intelligence Agencies Assess Wuhan Lab Data With Aim of Uncovering Origin of COVID-19

CNN sources have indicated that US Intelligence agencies have recently obtained data from the Wuhan institute of virology in Wuhan, China. It is part of Joe Biden’s 90-day push to uncover the origin of COVID-19, in which both the laboratory leak and animal transmission theories are being considered. 

It has not been disclosed how the data has been obtained by the US intelligence agencies, but the machines used to store this kind of genetic data are often connected to external cloud-based servers - suggesting they could have been hacked, according to CNN amongst other sources.

China earlier in the year refused to provide the raw data on 174 early COVID-19 cases to the World Health Organisation Team which had been sent to the country to establish the origins of the virus. The Journal of Emerging Microbes and Infections’ later published research papers suggest that the earliest cases began in Wuhan in October of 2019; many of the cases were connected with visits to the Hunan Seafood Wholesale Market. 

The task of the US intelligence agencies to turn the vast quantities of raw data into something useful is a difficult one. One of the issues is accessing enough computing power to process all of the information, with current processing being undertaken using the supercomputers at the US Department of Energy’s National Laboratories. There is also the issue of the intelligence agencies requiring government scientists skilled enough to understand the gene sequencing data, who have the appropriate security clearance and who are also fluent in Mandarin Chinese. An unnamed source told CNN:

“Obviously there are scientists who are (security) cleared … But Mandarin-speaking ones who are cleared? That's a very small pool. And not just any scientists, but ones who specialize in bio? So you can see how this quickly becomes difficult.”

Some of the publicly acknowledged data collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology represents 22,000 virus samples, which the Chinese government removed from the internet in September of 2019. The Chinese Communist Party has since refused to hand over any of its data. The aim of acquiring such data would be to see the virus’ evolutionary history. A source familiar with the investigation would neither confirm or deny that this data is the data that is being analysed by the US intelligence agencies currently. However, the source did outline the main aims of the investigation:

“The most prized technical data in this context are genetic sequences, database entries and contextual information about the provenance of the samples and the time and context in which they were acquired - information people would use to place them in a narrative of the origins of SARS, Covid.”

If this is the data being analysed, some are skeptical that it will achieve any notable results, for example Dr. Robert Garry, a virologist at the Tulane University School of Medicine, said: 

“Basically in [a 2020 research paper published in Nature], the Wuhan Institute Virology talked about all the sequences they had up until a certain point in time - it's what most scientists virologists (sic) believe, that's pretty much what they had.”