The Office of the Direction of National Intelligence (ODNI) published a report on June 23, 2023 investigating potential links between the Wuhan Virology Institute and origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The report states that “the CIA and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.” The report reveals there was no indication that the Wuhan lab had any incidents that could have caused the COVID-19 outbreak. 

US President Joe Biden had signed a bill in March requiring declassification of information related to the COVID-19 outbreak. This came shortly after FBI director Christopher Wray publicly announced that the pandemic was likely caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, China. The US Energy Department had also released an assessment in February, stating “with low confidence” that the outbreak may have leaked from a lab. 

The Wuhan lab leak theory has largely been pushed by the US administration with no evidence. At a press conference in April 2020, former President Donald Trump declared that his administration had evidence showing COVID-19 originated from a lab in Wuhan, but when asked to provide details he stated, “I can’t tell you that.” 

This is while Wang Wenbin, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, explained that the US has the world’s worst bio-lab safety records. He added that from January 2015 to June 2020, “the University of North Carolina (UNC) reported 28 lab incidents involving genetically engineered organisms to the NIH. Six of these incidents involved coronaviruses including SARS, MERS, and novel coronavirus, many of which had undergone genetic engineering.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon recently announced that it operated 46 biolabs in Ukraine after previously dismissing the claims as “Russian propaganda.” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian made remarks about the labs at a press briefing in Beijing in March, after Russia demanded transparency from the US over the military biological programs implemented in Ukraine.

Lijian also stated that the US  “has turned blind eyes and a deaf ear to the international community’s concerns about its biological laboratories at Fort Detrick and in the UNC and in its military bio-bases around the world.” 

The Wuhan lab leak theory is part of a larger anti-China defamation campaign in light of shifting global power dynamics. The latest US intelligence report, as well as documented American biolab operations in Ukraine, point to the complexities and mysteries behind the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health crisis that quickly became a political catastrophe.