'We'll never know' - expert plays down lab leak Covid-19 pandemic conclusion

“I think the real story here is about the media and how they're covering this, as opposed to any real shift in risk assessment by the US government,” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota told Reuters.

“When they put this new assessment forward, they set it with ‘low confidence’, which if you're in this business, you know, that means that may very well not even have any factual basis upon which to say that,” Osterholm added.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Sunday (February 26) that the US Energy Department had concluded the pandemic likely arose from a Chinese laboratory leak, an assessment Beijing denies.

The department made its judgment with "low confidence" in a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress, the Journal said, citing people who had read the intelligence report.

Also on Monday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said there has not been a definitive conclusion and consensus in the US government on the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some in the scientific community have concluded that the pandemic began as the result of a ‘spillover event’, with the virus spreading from animals to human beings.

There has also been speculation that the virus was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in Wuhan, China, the central Chinese city where the first human cases were reported in December 2019.

Professor Osterholm said it is impossible to know definitively.

“Could it have been a spillover event from animals into humans directly? Could it have been a potential virus in the lab that unintentionally infected workers there and then spread it? You know, we'll never know,” he said.

Osterholm, who was part of President Joe Biden’s 13-member Transition Covid-19 Advisory Board, said it is less important to know how the virus spread than it is to protect against all types of future outbreaks.

“We have to assume that both possibilities are real, and we have to plan for the future to say that we don't want to see another pandemic start because of a spillover event or because of a possible leak of the virus from that laboratory,” he said.

The Biden administration has continued to push China for transparency on the issue.

The US ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, said on Monday China must “be more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the Covid-19 crisis.”

Despite the Department of Energy’s reported conclusions, four other US agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that Covid-19 was likely the result of natural transmission, while two are undecided, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Professor Osterholm said there may never be a consensus.

“I think we're going to be left with this challenge of not having an answer any more than there are those very important criminal cases that have gone cold that over time never were solved,” Professor Osterholm said. “I think this is going to be exactly the same way.”

Reuters