The COVID Origins Debate: What Is at Stake for U.S. National Security?

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According to World Health Organization estimates, COVID-19 has killed nearly seven million people worldwide and over one million people in the United States alone. In May of 2021, President Biden ordered a 90-day intelligence review to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. While numerous possible origins were considered, according to declassified public statements issued by the Intelligence Community (IC) Working Group in August of 2021, “the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19” and “all agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”

The first hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, held in March of 2023, addressed these hypotheses and underscored the lack of conclusive evidence favoring any one origins theory. While many in the scientific community favor a zoonotic origin, other scientists as well as national security officials believe it came from a laboratory leak. The Department of Energy now joins the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) in concluding that the virus likely spread from a laboratory-related incident, but with “low confidence” as opposed to the FBI’s “moderate confidence.” Notably, four other agencies favor a natural origin, also with low confidence.

It is possible that the world will never definitively determine how COVID-19 originated. Yet the origins debate has raised many questions of critical importance for U.S. and global national security policy, some of which are under active review by the Biden administration. These questions include what constitutes “gain-of-function” research? What are the costs and benefits of conducting “gain-of-function” research domestically and in partnership with laboratories elsewhere, including in China? As tensions between the United States and China rise, and as the Chinese government resists demands for information that could help settle the puzzle of COVID origins, are there any forms of biological research that the United States should underwrite or conduct with non-democratic nations? If so, what sorts and under what conditions?

The Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, in partnership with the Annenberg Public Policy Center, will hold a public panel in which scientists, national security professionals, and journalists address the COVID origins debate as well as the broader national security stakes and bioethical implications of gain-of-function research conducted domestically and between the U.S. and Chinese scientific communities. Should the U.S. government fund sensitive biological research like the kind taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? How should the U.S. research enterprise mitigate safety and security risks associated with robust scientific collaboration between actors and institutions in the United States and China? How can the United States better guarantee the safety of this research?

PANELISTS
Katherine Eban, an investigative journalist, is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and Andrew Carnegie fellow.

Dr. Gigi Kwik Gronvall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Jamie Metzl is Founder and Chair of the global social movement, OneShared.World, a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, a faculty member of Singularity University and NextMed Health, and the author of five books.

Dr. Sergei Pond is Professor of Biology at the Institute for Genomics and Evolutionary Medicine of Temple University.

Dr. Susan Weiss is Professor and Vice Chair, Department of Microbiology, and Co-director of the Penn Center for Research on Coronaviruses and Other Emerging Pathogens at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

MODERATOR
Claire Finkelstein is the Algernon Biddle Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and Faculty Director of Penn’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law.