When the Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page lead story that the Department of Energy had concluded the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a leak from China’s Wuhan laboratory, you might have argued it was old news. The FBI had already, it turns out, come to the same conclusion and with a higher degree of confidence (moderate) than the Energy Department (low).

Those agencies’ conclusions, moreover, came as a result of a May 21 directive from President Joe Biden to multiple intelligence agencies to review two “equally plausible scenarios” for COVID’s origin, “whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal” (the zoonotic theory) “or from a laboratory accident” (the lab leak theory).… Continue Reading