Germanyʼs foreign intelligence service BND believes that the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 could well have been caused by a laboratory error at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
This is reported by the German newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zeit.
German intelligence bases its conclusions on an analysis of materials from the public domain collected during the investigation codenamed "Saaremaa".
Some of the material came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the pandemic is believed to have started. This data suggests that some risky research methods were used there, complicated by violations of laboratory safety rules.
There is evidence that researchers in Wuhan conducted so-called gain-of-function experiments, in which they manipulated naturally occurring viruses. This could have changed how the virus causes disease, how it is transmitted, and who it infects.
Germanyʼs foreign intelligence service learned this back in 2020, giving its findings a probability rating of 80% to 95%. However, this assessment was hidden from the public.
The coronavirus outbreak occurred in China in late 2019. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the spread of the coronavirus a pandemic. Chinese authorities linked the outbreak to the Wuhan Huanan Livestock and Seafood Market.
- On May 5, 2023, the WHO lifted the COVID-19 pandemic status.
- In December 2024, a US House of Representatives committee that spent two years investigating the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects in the US published a report concluding that the coronavirus "most likely originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China".
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