The U.S. intelligence agencies had neither the expertise nor the focus to provide the president and the nation with adequate scientific analysis to respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Early in the outbreak, scientific and medical misinformation originating from China, the World Health Organization and various medical think tanks was published ubiquitously. It rapidly gained the following of experts here as 'science.' But many were erroneous or even misleading. They were not challenged.

The epidemiological data upon which a catastrophic economic shutdown was based, for one, was not evaluated.

The origin of the COVID-19 virus, SARS-CoV-2, is still not known due to ongoing censorship, scientific deceit and an uncritical acceptance of a naturally occurring narrative, promoted by the Chinese Communist Party to avoid reparations, supported by some Western scientists with a vested interest in the outcome and facilitated by a biased and uninformed media.

Without accurate scientific information, correct decisions by national leaders are relegated to the realm of happy accidents.

The naturally occurring narrative asserts that the COVID-19 virus, while circulating in a bat population, mutated, acquiring the ability to infect humans, which was then transmitted to people either visiting or working in the Wuhan Seafood Market.

Even the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in an April 30, 2020 press release, blindly accepted the “wide scientific consensus” that the COVID-19 virus “was not man-made or genetically modified.”

Yet, there has never been conclusive scientific evidence to support that claim, quite the contrary.

Now, after months and endless media reports and scientific studies, the theory that the Wuhan Seafood Market was the source for animal–human COVID-19 transmission is now totally discredited, even by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Furthermore, the structure of the COVID-19 virus is different in some very significant ways from any of the close coronavirus relatives so far identified, raising questions as to how the virus “jumped” from animals to humans.

Much of the scientific inquiry related to the origin of COVID-19 has centered on a particular component of coronaviruses called the spike glycoprotein, which carries the ability for the virus to bind itself to a human cell and gain entry.

Although the scientific “conventional wisdom” says that COVID-19 came from bats, the binding component appears more closely related to pangolins (scaly anteaters) and there exists another structure in the COVID-19 virus called a furin polybasic cleavage site that exists in none of the closely related bat coronaviruses.

The probability of those two structural components evolving together in nature is very low. In contrast, experiments artificially inserting such components into coronaviruses have long been done by Chinese scientists.

In a recently-published interview, the former director of British intelligence (MI6), Sir Richard Dearlove said he had seen an "important" new scientific report suggesting the virus did not emerge naturally but was man-made by Chinese scientists.

The authors of that scientific study state that the COVID-19 virus has "unique fingerprints" that cannot have evolved naturally and are instead "indicative of purposive manipulation.”

The new study entitled "A Reconstructed Historical Aetiology of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike," says the COVID-19 virus is "remarkably well-adapted virus for human co-existence" and is likely to be the result of a Wuhan lab experiment to produce "chimeric viruses of high potency".

The paper concludes: "Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most especially when, as we also show, there are puzzling errors in their use of evidence."

Indeed. Understanding the true origin of the COVID-19 virus is key to avoiding the devastating effects of a future outbreak.

The time is long overdue for U.S. intelligence agencies to reassess their statement that the COVID-19 virus is naturally-occurring and establish the means for rapid and accurate scientific analysis of potential biological threats.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, who previously worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and conducted basic and clinical research in the pharmaceutical industry. 

Photo illustration by Monica Showalter with use of Pixabay public domain images