Nicoletta Lanese is the health channel editor at Live Science and was previously a news editor and staff writer at the site. She holds a graduate certificate in science communication from UC Santa Cruz and degrees in neuroscience and dance from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in The Scientist, Science News, the Mercury News, Mongabay and Stanford Medicine Magazine, among other outlets. Based in NYC, she also remains heavily involved in dance and performs in local choreographers' work.
A newly declassified U.S. intelligence report states that there's no evidence linking the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to research or biosafety incidents at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an institute located near the site of the first reported outbreak of the novel coronavirus.
"This report does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses" — that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spilled over from animals to humans or that the virus"leaked" from a laboratory, the document reads. However, the report does throw water on the notion that actions taken by WIV researchers somehow sparked the coronavirus pandemic.
"Information available to the IC [intelligence community] indicates that the WIV first possessed SARS-CoV-2 in late December 2019, when WIV researchers isolated and identified the virus from samples from patients diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown causes," the report states. As part of their research, WIV staff have genetically engineered coronaviruses using"common laboratory practices," but there's no indication that the institute has done such research with SARS-CoV-2, a closely related precursor, or a"backbone" virus that is closely related enough to SARS-CoV-2 to have been the source of the pandemic.
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