The Rest Is Classified - 166. The Covid Origin Story: Lab Leak or Animal Outbreak? (Ep 1)

Episode Date: June 14, 2026

Where does the CIA think the Covid-19 virus came from? And could it have been intentionally leaked as an act of biological warfare? Listen as David and Gordon step inside the investigation as to where Covid came from. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the declassified club at the rest is classified.com. Where does the CIA think the COVID-19 virus came from, and could it have been intentionally leaked as an act of biological warfare? Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And David, we're starting.

a two-part series on the CIA and the wider US intelligence community's effort to determine the origin of the COVID pandemic. Now, this is a story which really did affect the world. And we're going to take a particularly rest is classified lens on it, aren't we, to try and look at this really explosive and politically contentious question, which is where did the virus come from that killed millions and crippled the world economy. This episode is brought you by HP. In intelligence work, it's rarely the obvious problem that causes failure. It's the overlooked detail or the flaw nobody quite solved.

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me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. So this story looking at the intelligence community grappling with the origins of COVID-19. I think it is, it's a story about how spy agencies look at really tricky intelligence questions of a scientific nature. And frankly, spoiler alert, a story about the limits that intelligence agencies have when they look at those kinds of topics. And, you know, it's also a story, Gordon, I think about what happens when the spooks just cannot get to the bottom of a really important topic. happens when there is so much uncertainty over a major intelligence question that the assessments don't satisfy anybody. And when that question, the topic, becomes intensely politicized as it did in this case.

And when you have political pressures, diplomatic pressures, global pressures, and pressures from the White House, I think, on the intelligence community about that answer. because frankly so much was at stake with this question in terms of where it came from, who was to blame, was there someone to blame, was there a human hand involved in this, or was it purely natural? I mean, so much at stake, so much pressure and so much uncertainty really created a really heady mix, which I think is fascinating for us to look at as the rest is classified, to understand the pressures on intelligence communities and assessments when you get something

like that happened. We should say up front that this series is not, not going to be an examination of the total domestic political debate or the ins and outs of the really detailed science around these questions, even though we know Gordon Carrera loves himself, a rest of classified science explainer. There'll be a bit of that. There'll be a bit of that, but we're not going to go into the sort of, you know, the all-out political brawl that this turned into in the states. We're not going to go down to the sort of cellular level of the science. But we are going to show how intelligence agencies grappled with this question and how, I mean, also, this is another fascinating dynamic, how when intelligence agencies get embroiled in a politically charged topic,

they are then themselves accused of being political animals. So, David, I guess, I mean, I feel like, probably like a lot of people, I've blocked out how it all began and how it started. I mean, there's this kind of odd bit in my memory where, you know, of a period of months and even years, which I maybe like lots of people don't think about, but we do need to go back there. And the first signs really came out in November, December, 2019, not so much publicly, but in Wuhan, in China, in Hubei province, when there was a cluster of mysterious illnesses of an unknown cause. And that was the moment when something started. And actually that origin point will be quite important, won't it, to the intelligence

investigation and trying to understand where it came from and who knew what, when. But that was where it seems to have first originated back in that period around November 2019. And many of the earliest known patients did have connections to this Huanan seafood wholesale market, which is a site that also sold live animals. So there's an interesting cluster of cases in Wuhan, but also around this market, which we'll come back to in a moment. But on December 31st of 2019, China formally notifies the World Health Organization of that cluster. and in the first week of January, Chinese scientists have identified the culprit, which is a novel coronavirus.

Now, this is a type of virus which causes diseases and mammals and birds. COVID-19 is the disease that the virus causes. The virus itself is SARS-CoV-2, and it is related to the virus behind the 2003 SARS epidemic. The first known death is reported in Wuhan, on the 11th of January and just two days later. Thailand confirmed the first case outside of China. And then we get to, you know, these now iconic photos of, you know, China locking down Wuhan.

But cases nonetheless begin to appear all over the world. It's too late. And on February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization gave the disease its official name, COVID-19, coronavirus disease, 2019. in March, the World Health Organization declares a pandemic, which means that the virus has achieved sustained transmission worldwide. And then we enter this phase, you know, which I think somebody of us remember of, you know, governments responding with these really unprecedented measures, lockdowns, school and business closures, travel bans, mandates for mask wearing, the physical distancing, all of that. It's interesting because obviously this debate has carried through today. part of the reason we're doing this podcast. But the attempt, of course, to determine the origin of the virus,

it's, we should say, it's not just a matter of curiosity for the scientific community, right? It is, it is, there is a tremendous amount of value to be gained from learning where it came from because that knowledge could help us prevent further pandemics, obviously, to understand the virology of how these kind of, you know, pandemics, can start where the virus has come from. So the question is not this kind of theoretical, academic one. It's hugely important. And of course, there's a tremendous amount of investigation right away in the spring of 2020

about where it came from. That's right. And there were two general hypotheses. One is zoonotic, which means it naturally transmitted from animal to animal to human and through some kind of chain. And the second was an act involving a human in the sense of a lab leak. Now, we should say there are variations to what a lab leak meant. I mean, very few people, although there will be some who thought it might have been a deliberate leak from a lab.

And so the presumption was that something accidentally had been researched on and then leaked from the lab. But those were the two theories, and those basically remain broadly the two theories today, which we're looking at. But it's interesting, isn't it? Because very early on, there is a lot of pressure,

particularly from the scientific community. Maybe pressure's not the right word. There's a lot of emphasis from the scientific community pointing towards the zoonotic transmission route rather than the lab leak. I think that's exactly right. much of the framing for the conversation came, I mean, right away. In mid-February of 2020, there's something called the Lancet statement. Now, Lancet is, it's a very respected and influential

medical journal. The statement is signed by 27 scientists. It expresses solidarity with Chinese colleagues and condemned, quote, conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. And so right off the bat, you have this kind of this very influential statement from a bunch of scientists saying you are xenophobic and a conspiracy theorist if you are proposing the lab hypothesis. And we should say, though, that I think much of the research, the scientific research at the time, again, there wasn't total consensus, but I think there was The early science on this suggested that the zoonotic hypothesis was the answer, because there was a highly influential article in a publication called Nature Medicine that was titled The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. This is released in mid-arch of 2020.

So just as the world's going into lockdown, the article used comparative analysis of viral genomes. and the central conclusion, and I'm dramatically simplified the science here. And we're not even turning to Gordon Carrera, rest of classified science explainer, to go to go deep into o-linked glycans and the polybasic fureen cleavage site. We could. Sounds very exciting, but we're not going to. And basically the article says the virus arose through natural processes, rather than deliberate laboratory engineering. And that engineering point, again, will come back to this

because there's some different variations on the lab leak theory. But this seems to point toward a zoonotic transmission rather than something that's been engineered in a Chinese lab. The paper lays out a couple plausible kind of natural pathways. It says, look, the virus could have acquired its adaptations in an animal host and then jump to humans or it could have jumped first and then adapted during a period of undetected human to human spread, they consider bats the most likely reservoir for the virus. Now, the paper is hugely influential, hugely influential that spring. It's one of the most red

scientific papers of its era and it is treated as something close to a definitive answer in mainstream public health and media circle. So for example, Anthony Fauci, who is the top infectious disease, public health official in the U.S. He cites it from the White House podium in April 2020 as evidence that the virus's features are consistent with an animal-to-human jump. And of course, there's a lot of fear at this time that this thing, you know, is a genetically modified virus that has been built to be more infectious and more deadly than any other of these kind of, you know, SARS viruses before.

So the sense of the science of a community, I think that spring looks like, okay, this is a zoonotic virus like we have seen, for example, with SARS back in 2003. Now, the initial thinking is that the virus probably originated out of that wholesale market in Wuhan. And it's probably worth, I mean, a little bit on this market because it's turned out to be a centerpiece of the debate. Yes, because if the idea is that it's transmitted through animals and through different animals eventually to humans, then a wet market where animals are being sold and a wide range of animals are being sold like this Wuhan wet market is a perfect place for that to develop and for that to spread. So the wholesale market is this poorly ventilated market. There's still pictures of it you can find full of stalls where wild animals are sold for. food. And I was reading the list and it is extraordinary. There's snakes, badgers, musk rats,

birds, raccoon dogs, which look like I've discovered long-legged raccoons, but are more closely related to foxes. And it's actually thought that the SARS virus back in 2002, 2002, 2003, went from bats through these raccoon dogs potentially to humans. So the idea was that this is a perfect place, if you imagine that there is a transition of this through animals, to humans for that to take place. And then eventually, quite quickly, actually, the Chinese authorities are going to close it down, hose it down by January the 1st, by which case it's too late. So that's the market.

And I think it's fair to say that that was the consensus, it felt like, theory, that that's where it had originated. And the scientific paper did seem to push towards that idea and emphasize that possibility, didn't it? It did. And at the time, although the paper has become hugely controversial for a number of reasons, but mostly because Freedom of Information Act requests and then subsequent congressional investigations have unearthed all these emails and Slack messages show that the authors had privately discussed the lab leak scenario as a plausible one, even as the paper seems to dismiss a lab origin, right? So there are like private remarks in there from an author telling colleagues that a lab escape was, quote, so friggin' likely. And so there's politics around even that paper. But at the time, in the spring of 2020, I think the lab origin speculation is treated as a kind of conspiracy theory.

And it's often blended with this idea, which I think is what those scientists are initially reacting to in the Lancet statement, with this idea that the virus was a bio weapon that had been developed by the Chinese, which of course is like the nightmare scenario, that this is some bioweapon that got out. But in any case, it's kind of if you were in the lab leak camp in the early days of the virus, you're seen as a bit of a nut. I mean, ABC News runs a piece. Headlined, sorry conspiracy theorists. Study concludes COVID-19 is not a laboratory construct. The lab leak idea was banned on Facebook until I think the spring of 2021 is a form of misinformation. The New York Times ran a feature.

on the pandemic's origins in the summer of 2020, that groups lab speculation with, you know, other conspiracy theories, aliens, JFK, assassination, all this kind of stuff. So I think that's the sense of the scientific community, the political kind of commentary around this as we get into the late spring of 2020. Maybe there, Gordon, we take a break.

When we come back, we'll see how the spies begin stepping into the fray. Hello everybody. I hope you realize, dear listeners, that Father's Day is coming up on the 21st of June. It's all very excited, Gordon. And if you haven't got anything yet for your father, and if you're on speaking terms, we have an incredible gift idea for you. Because what more do Dad's love than something intelligence and espionage related? And this year, we're offering 25% off a gifted annual membership to the declassified. Club. So you can treat your father to early access to full series, bonus episodes, and much, much more. That's right. You could gift your dad what he truly wants, which is six hours on a rock WMD with no ads in between. Give him the gift of Moore Gordon and David in his life.

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wide leg. So welcome back. We established that the idea of zoonotic natural, if you like, transmission is the broad consensus and the idea of a lab leak is seen as a conspiracy. And it's about April, late April 2020 when the intelligence community starts to get drawn in on this. And I guess that's because it is a question which is still being asked by politicians by the public. Where did this come from? What does the intelligence community know? And I guess it's natural, isn't it? We think there might be a secret out there. We want to understand something. What does spies have to offer on answering that? Well, you know, another theme of this question, the investigation around it, will be that the Chinese government has not provided fulsome cooperation to really get to the bottom of this.

And so, again, we've talked before the break about those early cases. You know, you'd want to have access to the early cases in order to establish, you know, have a better sense of the virus's origins. That's not happened by the spring. There's been a World Health Organization kind of visit to China that seems to confirm the not a hypothesis, but also makes, you know, that's sort of, that's where the Chinese government wanted to land anyway. So there's, there's this kind of, I think, a growing sense that, well, someone's covering something up, right? Yeah. And, and maybe the Chinese are covering up the true

origins of this, which then seems to make this a relevant question for intelligence agency. So on April 30th of 2020, the office of the director of national intelligence puts out what I think is a I think this is a very ambiguous statement that I think it ultimately kind of backfires, because the goal was to suppress, I think, the growing fear around the lab leak theory. And the statement goes like this. It said the intelligence community concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified, but that the intelligence community would continue to assess whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals. or if it was the result of an accident at a lab in Wuhan. And so the statement's not saying much. But. But.

But, I mean, I think it's a fascinating statement because it's a statement designed to basically say, well, we're looking at the different possibilities. But it is holding out the possibility of a lab leak, of an accident as a laboratory. In a sense, it's putting it on an equal footing. So it's bound to at least elicit more interest in it. And I guess this is where who else but Donald Trump enters the fray, because we should remind people, I guess, here that this is the tail end of the first Trump term. Again, another thing which people may have blocked out from their minds for various reasons, the undulations of American politics over these years.

I don't know what you're talking about, Gordon. I'm offended. I'm offended as a yank. But I guess one of the things to remember is at this point, particularly actually more in his first term, Donald Trump had been big on China, and I don't mean big in a kind of positive way. But he was pushing hard against China, trade deals particularly. The temperature was hotter, I think, than it is now, actually at the moment, in the second Trump term, when it came to China. and this is something which he is going to get involved in and where politics is going to meet this question of intelligence in the lab leak. Because at a press briefing just hours after that ODNI, Director of National Intelligence statement, Trump immediately distances himself from the fairly, I'd say kind of nothing burger,

but also balanced statement, factual statement that the intelligence community has put out. Trump, you know, distances himself from that pretty rapidly. He claims that he has seen classified information that the virus had come from a lab. Wow. And when asked what the evidence was, he said, I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that. Wow. So right off the bat, we have this unfortunate reality that the intelligence community's public assessments and statements aren't matching what the president sank. And so there is, I think a real, if you're, if you're a a kind of unbiased person who's looking at this, you're saying, well, either someone's lying to me or someone's hiding something, right? And is it the intelligence community? Is the intelligence community sitting on information in secret that doesn't match the public statements?

Or is the president pushing his agenda against China? Right. Trump is basically saying that he buys the lab leak angle. And so maybe it's worth setting up what that hypothesis actually is. Now, it's interesting that there is a lab in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the WIV, it's been around since the 1950s. It's one of China's premier virology centers. Kind of looks like a college campus, red brick buildings set beside this Mayabed Lake. And the Wib's signature work has long focused on bat-borne coronavirus. viruses. It's an emphasis that really intensified after the 2003 SARS epidemic. The Institute has a very prominent world-renowned scientist, Xi Zhang Li, who's who had the nickname Batwoman. And the

WIV housed one of the world's largest collections of bat samples and bat virus strains. There are only two other labs in the world that do anything similar. One of them's in Texas, and one of them is in North Carolina. So right off the bat, you have this very weird piece of circumstantial evidence, coincidence, that the world is in the midst of a pandemic caused by a coronavirus, and some of the most cutting-edge coronavirus research in the world is being done at a nearby lab. That is just a fact. Now, one piece of Xi Zhang Li's work, drew later scrutiny. And it's, you know, in a 2015 paper,

she had showed that a spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells. And this is research at the boundary of what is now called gain of function work, which is essentially research. And again, well, maybe, Gordon, you are the science explainer. I've done nuclear physics, but I'm afraid this is a little bit beyond me. But I find this gain of function work really interesting and slightly weird because this is taking a virus and engineering it in a lab to see if you can make it more infectious. And this is something scientists do to understand what the risks are of a more infectious disease and potentially how you can treat it and deal with it.

But I still find it extraordinary that they do that. And this will be one of, I think, the controversial aspects, you know, in the science. science world is the fact that people are doing this kind of work, which to me is inherently risky. I mean, we hear so much about people trying to make bioweapons. Well, this is kind of trying to do that. Now, obviously, for good scientific, defensive reasons and to try and protect people, but you can see the risks. And the fact that there are also other researchers, including from the West, who are involved in some of this work and who have an interest in presenting it as something positive and not seeing it as something dangerous

or that could have led to the release of coronavirus will become part of the story because I think those scientists are very keen to say, don't look at this gain of function work as a problem because this is what we do and are worried about it. But what it shows is that they were doing that kind of work on coronaviruses and on bats here in this particular institute. And then on top of all of that,

there's real legitimate concerns about, the safety measures that are being taken at the Wuhan Institute of Biology. I think this is in maybe April of 2020, so it's in the first few months of the pandemic. The Washington Post, a reporter named Josh Rogan at the Washington Post, breaks a story about concerns around those biosafety measures. And he got access to some State Department cables that had been categorized as sensitive but unclassified. and they are cables from basically the kind of science diplomats that are at the U.S. embassy in Beijing

who went on a visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and reported back in these cables to Washington about what they'd seen. And the cables warn about safety and management weaknesses there and actually propose that the U.S. might consider offering more attention and help. One cable warned that the labs work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic and one of the cables from January of 2018 read, quote, during interactions with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab, they noted the new lab has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high containment laboratory. Right. So there's, there's worries. Right, there's worries that predate the pandemic. Now, she Zangley herself had also publicly acknowledged that up until the pandemic, all of her team's coronavirus research had been conducted in less secure biological safety level three and even biological safety level two labs.

And BSL, biological safety level four is like the absolute upper end. B.SL2 is like the equivalent of a doctor's office or a dentist's office. Wow. Okay. Right. So they're doing coronavirus research. Now, we don't know exactly, is it the gain of function stuff? Is it other research?

But some of the coronavirus research is being done in facilities at the WIV that are, say, not particularly safe. And there had also been, and I think this is also another piece of the mystery, collaboration between the Whiv and military scientists attached to the PLA, the Chinese military, that goes back decades. There's over 50 co-authored papers. And frankly, on the face of it, you'd expect that, right? There's collaboration between the big national labs in the U.S. and the U.S. military.

That's obvious. But this connection between the. the WIV and the PLA scientists, some of whom do work inside or adjacent to China's bio-weapons program, raises the prospect of this worst-case scenario, which is, was the virus engineered as a biological weapon? And did it escape or, you know, in kind of the more conspiracy end of it, did the Chinese actually release it on purpose? So we end up with a series of competing hypotheses or, you know, potential options to explain what had happened. One is zoonotic origin. This idea is something

happened at that wet market, maybe a bat or something else through another animal, eventually to humans, and that's why it spreads at Wuhan. And the other option is the Wuhan Institute Virology, there is some kind of leak from there. And it is this weird coincidence. You both have a, you know, at the place where the virus emerges, you have both a wet market, which is a potential place, and you have an Institute of Virology. And I guess within the lab leak theory, as you've put it there, you've got different possibilities, haven't you? You've got just that there happened to be an animal there and the virus escapes, or you've got that they were engineering something with gain of function research, and that that escapes, or you've

got at the most extreme end, you've got the idea that they're building bio weapons to kill us all there and that that escaped. I mean, they all sit within lab leak, but they're all different, aren't they, to some extent? And also, I mean, we should say, you know, by the middle of 2021, I mean, the pandemic is an absolute catastrophe, right? Global confirmed deaths by that point are about three million against more than 140 million cases worldwide. And then when you look at the excess mortality estimates from the World Health Organization or the economist. I mean, the real figure is probably well above the confirmed count. The pandemic has triggered the worst global downturn since the Great Depression. So the question of how did this happen and how might we

prevent it from happening again is a really, really, really big question. And as we get into 2021, those lab leak theories, and I think in particular the idea that it was, it was zoonotic but had escaped from the lab somehow or that it had been engineered and escaped somehow or really starting to gain steam because there's no host animal that's yet been discovered to prove the natural theory, although that would be hard and I think is unlikely.

The Chinese, secondly, have aggressively blocked efforts at an investigation. The government had actually shut down the market. They'd ordered lab samples destroyed, tried to review any scientific research about COVID-19 and the head of publication. They'd expelled team of Wall Street Journal reporter. So there's this question of like, what are they covering up, right? Why are the Chinese so insistent that we'd not find the origins of this pandemic, right?

And given the, you know, given China's authoritarian politics, there's this question of, well, if a leak had happened, would the Wuhan Institute of Virology with the scientists there have even been permitted to talk about it? So there's much more focus on the LabLey Hypothesis. There's a big Vanity Fair article by Catherine Eben that goes deep into the open source researchers who are investigating COVID's origins and the fight over this question inside the government. And I think really importantly, the scientific consensus is starting to break down a little bit because there's a former New York Times science writer named Nicholas Wade who puts out a big piece, basically looking at the scientific clues, both for and against a lab leak. You know, he quotes a really respected microbiologist named Dr. David Baltimore, who says that he believes that, and again, we won't go into the absolute details of the science, but he basically says that when you look at the actual, you know, virus genome, that there are particular signs that suggest it might have actually been manmade, right?

or genetically modified in some way. So you start to feel like this needs to be taken seriously. This can't be seen as a purely conspiracy theory going forward. And we should also say the public opinion on this is shifting. So the polling that's happening in the spring of 2021 shows that actually a majority of Americans believe that the Lab leak theory was either definitely or probably true, like 59%. according to an economist UGov poll done in May June of 2021. And there are indications that U.S. intelligence has picked up, I think, something useful, finally, to add to this debate.

Finally. Because that is the point is you have a mystery, but you would logically think there are answers out there that may be secret, particularly because the Chinese government is working so hard to prevent something coming out and to keep a tight lid on the investigation and on the discussion about this, which to me makes it a perfect question for intelligence agencies to be tasked to answer. It's not entirely clear to me that they were yet looking that hard, but at this point it seems they are starting to pick things up. You know, it's a classic example of there are different tiers,

of intelligence questions, right? I mean, some are not as important as others. And what happens in the spring of 2021 is that this question rises not to the absolute top, I'm sure, but it gets to the point where Joe Biden, who is then president, have won the 2020 election, and he's now in office in the spring of 2021, says, okay, let's have the intelligence community take a look at this and give us an answer, and he commissions a 90-day sprint to get to the bottom of the origins of the pandemic. So there, with the sprint underway, let's stop. And next time, we'll look at what an intelligence community can find out about this highly contentious and incredibly well-defining issue about the origins of the COVID virus. And we'll look at just how

politicized that question and that debate because. comes. Also a reminder, if you're not a member of the Declassified Club, shame on you. And you can rectify it right now by going to the rest is classified.com and joining the club where you get access, early access to series, bonus episodes, and a whole lot of other goodies. Also, please do sign up for our free newsletter where you'll get in-depth stories every week, many of which delivered by us. But otherwise, we'll see you next time. See you next time. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.

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