Staff members work at a medical facility in Wuhan, China on February 17, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images)

Amid mounting concerns about the true origins of COVID-19 and an alleged cover-up by China, President Biden announced this week that the U.S. government would "redouble its efforts" to investigate this crucial question. In the spirit of our founder Herman Kahn, Hudson experts have been at the forefront of "thinking the unthinkable" about the emergence of the virus, and have been sounding the alarm about China’s efforts to conceal evidence, derail investigations, and evade responsibility.

David Asher, now a senior fellow at Hudson, was responsible for the Department of State's investigation into the origins of the pandemic before the program was halted by the Biden administration. Contrary to the assertions of the Chinese government, the evidence gathered by Asher's team indicates that the virus likely originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where classified Chinese military funding supported gain-of-function research on bat-borne illnesses.

In March, David Asher convened a bipartisan panel moderated by former CBS News D.C. Bureau Chief Chris Isham to examine the evidence connected to the Wuhan lab leak. See key takeaways below, and visit Hudson's Coronavirus Timeline for a month-by-month examination of the coronavirus' origins and the Chinese Communist Party’s response.

Key Takeaways

Featured quotes from the event, The Origins of COVID-19: Policy Implications and Lessons for the Future.

1. According to Jamie Metzel, a former security official serving on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, the Chinese government exercised almost complete control over early investigations into the virus:

[Efforts to launch an investigation into the origins of the pandemic] went to the World Health Assembly in May. It was this kind of strange thing where a resolution that began as saying, "Let's have a tough look at where and how Covid began," with strong Chinese opposition, somehow morphed into a Chinese-led resolution calling for an investigation into the zoonotic origin of the virus. Already, it was pushing toward one particular outcome, a series of zoonotic jumps through intermediate animal hosts.

After that, the WHO negotiated from a very weak position the terms of reference with the Chinese government for that investigation. Unfortunately, China negotiated veto power over who got to be an investigator. It was agreed that in most areas, the Chinese government would actually do the primary research and present its findings to these international "investigators." So, already there was a big restriction. Then when this team went to China, there was an expectation I think in other parts of the world that this was a real investigation. Not only was it not a real investigation, it was more of a chaperoned two week study tour where they were given highly curated information.

2.  David Asher contends that the evidence linking the virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been “hiding in plain sight”: 

I started to "follow the money" into a number of installations ascended around the Wuhan Institute of Virology... We had to look at the personnel list there, the people that were publicly known. Dr. Shi has been working on bat-borne coronaviruses for well over 15 years as a research priority. Including the development of synthetic hybrids of bat coronaviruses, which are using the so-called gain-of-function technique to increase their lethality…

We have to understand that they were engaged in bat-borne, live bat research at the Wuhan Institute. Something which they never admitted, but they have patents publicly for their bat containment vessels that they have at their institute. There are all sorts of things that are hiding in plain sight. What we did was take what was hiding in plain sight, and then combine it with some high-end information collected by our intelligence community, only a swath of which was declassified.

But the key thing that was declassified [was] the first known cluster that we're aware of, victims of we believe to be COVID-19...The fact that the initial cluster of victims surrounded the very institute that was doing the highly dangerous if not dubious research is significant. And the fact that they massively covered it up, destroyed evidence, and denied access in a way that they didn't do in SARS-COVID-1 back in 2002, 2003. [At that time] I was the senior State Department official involved in discussing that issue with the Chinese government and they had more than enough to tell us about that. They kept it pretty secret from our own people, but they did warn us that they had a big problem on their hands. In this case, they told us nothing.

3. American scientists encounter conflicts of interest when they partner with Chinese laboratories to circumvent U.S. ethical research standards, argues Miles Yu, Hudson Senior Fellow and former China policy advisor to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo:

Major science magazine journals, like Nature and Science, have warned for years about the irony that in many scientific fields, because of strong ethically defined standards, many researchers in the West and U.S. could not do the kinds of experiments on certain animals, particularly primates. China's lax regulation and their very low bio safety standards would allow that, and they have created a very lucrative and inviting opportunity for many scientists in the West to collaborate with Chinese colleagues and do the kind of research that they could not have otherwise done in the West... It's very attractive to a lot of American scientists. That created a conflict of interest when it comes to searching for culpability for [the] origin of all kinds of viruses in China, because many scientists have some interest involving this.

4. Gain-of-function research should only be performed at secure U.S. government labs, if done at all, notes Andy Weber, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs under President Obama: 

The justification for [gain-of-function] research is that it will better prepare us for a pandemic. But the risk of conducting this type of research is that these super viruses that you create in doing this research might escape from a laboratory, even with good biosafety conditions. My feeling is this is a policy debate we need to have.

The Obama administration imposed a moratorium. It was lifted by the Trump administration in 2017. They did put in a review process that looks at the risk benefit equation. But clearly, I think that was inadequate because we continue to conduct this type of risky research not just in the United States...we export it overseas where we should have a policy of only working with laboratories that meet our very strict biosafety standards. My own view is that if this type of research is justified, it should only occur, at least the U.S. government-funded research in this area, should only occur in the most secure and safe U.S. government laboratories. Not in academic laboratories, and certainly not overseas.

Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

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