The Covid Commission: Planning the Groundwork for an Independent Commission to Investigate Pandemics, as Sensited by Burr, Burr and Murray

Infectious disease experts predict that pandemics will occur with increasing frequency, fueled by global travel, climate change and humans moving into closer proximity with animals. Pandemics are as much a threat to national security as terrorist attacks are. But the public is not sure about that.

One source said that the assessment from the Department of Energy is similar to information released by the House Republican Intelligence Committee last year.

The inquiries are partisan. The bill to create the independent commission would establish a 12-member expert panel of “highly qualified citizens” appointed by congressional leaders from both parties. Like the Sept. 11 panel it would hold public hearings. The response by the Trump and Biden administrations would be examined.

“There’s no substitute for showing the vision that we showed in the early 2000s at creating an architecture that fixes things that we got wrong then, that addresses things that we didn’t think of then that we’ve learned, having gone through it,” said Senator Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the health committee’s top Republican, who is sponsoring the measure with Ms. Murray.

The Covid Commission Planning Group is privately funded and involves many independent experts who have spent the past couple of years conducting research to lay the groundwork for a national inquiry. The group, which has held several hundred interviews, grew tired of waiting for Congress and plans to publish its findings in a book this spring, Mr. Zelikow said. He didn’t discuss the details.

But two years since that high-profile trip, the WHO has abandoned its phase-two plans. “There is no phase two,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist at the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, told Nature. She said that the plan for work to be done in phases had changed. “The politics across the world of this really hampered progress on understanding the origins,” she said.

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.

That July, the WHO sent a circular to member states outlining how it planned to advance origins studies. Proposed steps included assessing wild-animal markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supplied those markets, as well as audits of labs in the area where the first cases were identified.

But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. The spokesman for China’s foreign ministry said that the second phase shouldn’t focus on the pathways that the mission report had already ruled out, because they weren’t agreed on by all member states.

Van Kerkhove says that the WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has continued to directly engage with Chinese government officials to encourage China to be more open and to share data. The WHO staff contacted the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing to try to establish partnerships. Van Kerkhove is eager to work with his colleagues there. It’s really a deep frustration.

“I still hope that progress will be made,” says Thea Fischer, a public-health virologist at the University of Copenhagen, who was a member of the mission to Wuhan and is part of SAGO.

The latest intelligence assessment of Covid-19 from a lab leak in China: thanking the Biden administration for making sure that the investigation doesn’t end there

Intelligence agencies can make assessments with either low, medium or high confidence. A low confidence assessment means that there is not enough reliable information available to make a conclusive judgement, or there isn’t enough information available to make a more robust conclusion.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on the new assessment from the Department of Energy. The intelligence assessment was updated in light of new intelligence, further study of academic literature, and consultation with other experts outside the government, according to a senior US intelligence official.

McCaul said the time was right for the entire Biden administration to join the Department of Energy, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the majority of Americans by publicly concluding what common sense told them at the beginning: that the Covid-19 outbreak began from a lab leak in China.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is one of 18 government agencies that are part of the intelligence community.

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 Mike McCaul said Sunday he was “pleased” that the Department of Energy “has finally reached the same conclusion that I had already come to.”

“I have requested a full and thorough briefing from the administration on this report and the evidence behind it,” the Texas Republican said in a statement.

McCaul said the administration needs to work with their partners and allies around the world to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable and make sure something like this never happens again.

“We need to do extensive hearings. I think our Democratic colleagues in the Congress will support that. I know the Republicans in the House are certainly supportive of that,” the Senate Armed Services Committee member said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Three Years of Covid-19: The Implications for the Intelligence and Public Health Sectors in the U.S. and China

“Think about what just happened over the last three years, one of the biggest pandemics in a century. A lot of evidence that it’s coming from the Chinese,” Sullivan said.

A spokesperson for House Oversight Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said in a statement that the committee was “reviewing the classified information provided” by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a letter requesting information earlier this month.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that the intelligence community remains divided on the matter, while noting that President Joe Biden has put resources into getting to the bottom of the origin question.

Why does it matter where Covid-19 came from? Finding the answer can help prevent the next epidemic, said Relman to CNN.

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.

Four agencies in the intelligence community had assessed the risk of a wild outbreak of the virus and found it to be low.

The intelligence community elements were able to coalesce around either explanation but could not do so without more information.

Advocacy of the lab leak theory had to fight against claims of being Racist and xenophobic in part because of anti-Chinese rhetoric from then-president Donald Trump.

An inquiry launched by Trump’s State Department, which sought to investigate whether China’s biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemic’s 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.

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“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure.”

It can take months or years to discover the host that the disease passed through as it adapted to humans.