Leak or No Leak
By 
I absolutely do not have the scientific expertise to evaluate the claims in the WSJ Department of Energy lab leak story, but I figured it was worth an open thread:
The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
What I will say is that this conversation has been conducted with levels of certainty and stridency that the evidence in either direction does not seem to support. That said, I again defer to folks who have a better grip on the scientific details than I. There certainly are stakes here; although the Chinese government would never own up to a lab leak (even if it happened), it would call for a retelling of the story of the pandemic than leaned more heavily into political factors, and especially into the politics of accountability in authoritarian states. China’s “success” in managing the virus very much became center to the CCP’s story about itself and (more broadly) its story about the viability of authoritarian systems of government in the 21st century. That story has decayed quite a bit as China’s mitigation efforts have collapsed, and it would undoubtedly decay even further if the origins of and early response to the virus were somehow tied up in authoritarian practices at Wuhan. But again, let me be clear that I’m not endorsing any one of the many available interpretations of the evidence.