the second world war or new assessment of the worst pandemic since 1918 china is front and center tonight. on ukraine members of the administration spoke today and over the weekend warning beijing that arming russia would be a mistake. we are confident that the chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment that would be a very risky and unwise bet. bill burns, the cia director. on covid we learned yesterday that the department of energy has assessed in a newly updated intelligence report that it most likely originated from a laboratory leak. cnn has just learned the reason for that updated report. three sources telling cnn that the department of energy shift was based in part on information about the research that the chinese centers for disease control, the chinese cdc in wuhan, was doing around the time of the outbreak on a coronavirus variant. cnn has previously reported that the lab was studying coronaviruses m bats but it is unclear how closely
studying coronavirus variant around the time of the outbreak. how is that different from what was already known about the work the lab was doing? anderson, i don t know. we would need more information because we had already known that the two labs in wuhan, the chinese cdc as well as the wuhan institute of virilology, they were studying coronavirus, an active area of research for them. to have more evidence in favor of the lab leak theory we would have to find that the samples they were working with in the lab were genetically linked or genetically the same as the ones that caused illness in those individuals infected with covid-19 initially. we don t have that information. i think the bigger issue here is that we know that there are two possible theories, the lab leak theory, the animal spill over theory. there are data points in both directions but if both are possible we also need to protect against the next pandemic by working to protect the world against both of these possibilit
fair her latest piece, inside the fight to uncover covid-19 s origins. you looked into the minors who fell ill in 2012 as well as researchers at the wuhan institute of virilology who got sick the fall of 2019 reportedly. what did you find? it is really quite remarkable, anderson. thank you for having me on. the minors in 2012 were tasked with shoveling out a thick layer of bat feces from this mine shaft. they became incredibly ill, you know, with symptoms that as we learned about them looked like covid-19 in 2012. the oldest one among them died first. the disease was fierce, as a masters thesis documented it. it was identified as somehow being linked to a bat virus. and the sample from the mine
that was taken was initially labeled by wuhan institute of virilology researchers as something called 4991. later, in the wake of covid-19, when they wrote about it, they labeled it ratg-13. researchers i write about in my story realized actually it was the same thing and the reason it matters is because it is at the moment the closest progenitor to sars cov 2 which is the virus that causes covid-19. so there are questions about whether researchers at the wuhan institute of virilology somehow attempted to conceal the links from this cave. i should say they were doing research to hopefully prepare us for and prevent pandemics but it seems that the case of those
untoward but the real issue is the kind of research going on in the wuhan institute of virilology is called gain of function research. it is an effort to try to make p pathogens more infectious and whether they ll be infectious to humans. there is a lot of controversy surrounding this research. there is real concern that you ve got an institute seven miles from the epicenter of the outbreak that had these strains which were taken from this mine. those strains were renamed. and they were doing this risky gain of function research. the other piece of this is that the u.s. government in part was funding some of that research through a sort of middle