‘No Idea’ If COVID-19 Originated in Chinese Laboratory: NIH Director

Acting Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Lawrence Tabak testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 17, 2022. (Shawn Thew/AFP via Getty Images)

COVID-19 may have originated in a set of laboratories in China that was conducting experiments with U.S. taxpayer dollars, the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) said on April 19.

“Did the COVID-19 virus originate from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) asked Dr. Lawrence Tabak, the acting NIH director, during a hearing in Washington.

“I have no idea,” Tabak said.

The NIH funded experiments done at the institute, which is located in the same city where the first COVID-19 cases were detected in late 2019.

At least some of those experiments resulted in the increase of a virus’s transmissibility, the NIH acknowledged in 2021. Experiments that increase the pathogenicity or transmissibility of a biological agent like a virus are commonly known as gain-of-function.

Tabak said that no gain-of-function experiments were done at the institute, despite authoring the NIH acknowledgment.

He also said he believes that COVID-19 spread from bats to an intermediary animal before infecting humans.

“There are two prevalent theories—a lab accident, or as you say a lab leak, versus a zoonotic transfer from animals to humans,” Tabak said. “In my mind, the available evidence favors the latter, but of course our minds are open to the former possibility.”

Tabak did not cite any of the evidence and the NIH, whose former top officials worked hard to promote the natural origin theory, did not respond to a request for citations.

Natural origin theory proponents have largely said most COVID-19 cases came from a wet market full of animals near the institute, with one recent paper saying new sequencing data supports the theory. Lab leak theory proponents have noted that Chinese officials have withheld key evidence from the labs and that no intermediary animals have been identified more than two years after COVID-19 started.

“Natural emergence typically leaves behind a story, a trail, a footprint,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told reporters in a briefing this week. “Convincing evidence is yet to be presented.”

Marshall was holding a briefing on a report he released that delved into the origins debate and concluded that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Investigators who spent 18 months looking into the matter said that there were signs Chinese researchers started developing COVID-19 vaccines at the institute no later than November 2019 and that the virus “resulted from failures of biosafety containment during SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-related research.” SARS-CoV-2 is a name for the virus that causes COVID-19.

John Ratcliffe, who was the former director of national intelligence from 2020 to 2021, told a different congressional panel this week that a lab leak “is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense.”

According to the latest information, U.S. intelligence agencies are split on the origin of COVID-19, with several favoring a natural origin and several others saying a lab leak is most likely. President Joe Biden signed a bill on March 20 that mandates declassifying intelligence “relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19),” but no new intelligence has yet been released.