(NEW YORK) — U.S. Customs and Border Protection said a “very small number” of Afghan evacuees have been “flagged for concern” during their vetting and screening at military bases around the world.
“It’s exactly why CBP conducted careful and thorough vetting,” Keri Brady, the assistant director at CBP’s National Targeting Center, told law enforcement leaders around the country Friday on a call, a copy of which was obtained by ABC News.
CBP has deployed resources to overseas bases where Afghans are being transported to conduct vetting and screening using biometrics, along with counterparts from the FBI.
Representatives from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and the State Department spoke on the call about the administration’s handling of Afghan nationals once they are in the United States.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at Friday’s briefing that DHS would take the lead in helping Afghans settle in the U.S.
Officials on the call also detailed different threat scenarios that authorities are tracking domestically and abroad.
DHS said it is tracking people abroad who could use the relocation process as a way to get into the U.S.
John Cohen, the acting head of DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis, said they are monitoring “whether individuals who are abroad or ISIS elements could use the relocation process as a way to introduce operatives intending to conduct an attack within the homeland.” In an effort to “counteract” this threat, Cohen said there is an extensive screening process.
Timothy Langan, the assistant director of the Counterterrorism Division, echoed Cohen’s concerns, saying they “can’t rule out” extremists trying to use the evacuations to come to the U.S.
“We [also] can’t rule out that this could be some type of additional motivator,” Langan explained.
The DHS is also monitoring if people in the U.S. are inspired by “narratives associated with al-Qaida, ISIS or other foreign terrorist group, and whether they would view the events occurring in Afghanistan as an opportunity to engage in violence here at home,” Cohen said.
Cohen told law enforcement leaders that there are domestic violent extremists lashing out because Afghans are coming to the U.S.
“In our analysis of online platforms commonly used by anti-government white supremacist and other domestic violent extremist organizations and groups, we are seeing several narrative trends emerge having to do with concerns [about] the relocation of Afghans to the United States,” Cohen said. “In it is an element of the great replacement concept, or a concept that would lead to a loss of control and authority by the white race, and there are concerns that those narratives may incite violent activities directed at immigrant communities, certain faith communities or even those who are relocated to the United States.”
Cohen also explained on the call that some extremists see what the Taliban did as a “success.”
“In those narrative streams, there have been commentary focusing on potential acts of violence directed at U.S. government, law enforcement and others who are considered to be symbols of the current government structure,” Cohen explained.
Langan said the FBI stood up a command post at its headquarters to detect any “potential national security or public safety concerns,” and added they are working 24/7.
The State Department has relocated over 100,000 individuals from Afghanistan and “many” in the last three weeks, according to Larry Bartlett, the agency’s director of refugee resettlement.
Officials also provided more details about the process of coming to the United States, saying in addition to opening up Washington Dulles International Airport and Philadelphia International Airport they expect to open more airports to Afghans soon. They did not go into further detail.
When Afghan evacuees arrive at a military base, they are tested for COVID-19, and if they test positive are quarantined on base. They are tested again once they arrive into the U.S., the acting associate director of Field Operations at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services said.
Upon arrival into the U.S., they are given the option to get a COVID-19 vaccine as well.
War has been celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and as part of the festivities, a new animated video looking at the stories behind some of the funk/rock/soul group’s biggest hits has debuted at the band’s official YouTube channel.
The “Behind the Hits” clip features commentary by founding singer/keyboardist Lonnie Jordan and producer/songwriter Jerry Goldstein, who helped put the band together with its original lead singer, Eric Burdon of The Animals.
The video briefly touches on the band’s formation and also looks at such classic songs as “Slippin’ into Darkness,” “The World Is a Ghetto,” “The Cisco Kid,” “Don’t Let No One Get You Down,” “Low Riders” and “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” The clip also notes that War songs have been heard in a variety of movies and TV shows, including Cheech & Chong‘s Up in Smoke, Gone in 60 Seconds, Dazed and Confused, Lethal Weapon 4, Friday, The Simpsons, and Mayans M.C.
The “Behind the Hits” video arrives in advance of a new War compilation titled Greatest Hits 2.0 that’s scheduled to be released on October 29 as a two-CD set, a two-LP vinyl collection, digitally and via streaming services. The 24-track album is a career-spanning sequel to the band’s platinum-certified 1976 Greatest Hits retrospective. You can pre-orderGreatest Hits 2.0 now.
War currently is on tour and has more than a dozen 2021 dates on its schedule. Visit War.com for more information.
Here’s the Greatest Hits 2.0 track list:
Disc 1
“Spill the Wine” — Eric Burdon & War
“Tobacco Road” — Eric Burdon & War
“All Day Music”
“Get Down”
“Slippin’ into Darkness”
“The World Is a Ghetto”
“The Cisco Kid”
“Gypsy Man”
“Me and Baby Brother”
“Why Can’t We Be Friends?”
“Don’t Let No One Get You Down”
“Heartbeat”
Disc 2
“Low Rider”
“So”
“Smile Happy”
“Summer”
“L.A. Sunshine”
“Galaxy”
“Youngblood (Livin’ in the Streets)”
“Good, Good Feelin'”
“Cinco de Mayo”
“You Got the Power”
“Outlaw”
“Peace Sign”
(KABUL, Afghanistan) — Sarina Faizy, 23, just graduated from William & Mary with a master’s in international law, and she said she’d hoped to celebrate with her family — instead she’s struggling to stay in contact with them.
Her family, including her six sisters, had been in hiding, looking for a way out of Afghanistan as President Joe Biden’s Aug. 31 deadline drew closer.
“They’re depressed, and they have a trauma, all Afghan people do,” Faizy told ABC News on Monday. “Right now, they’re kind of stuck in one place, and they don’t know what is going to happen next to them because of the Taliban.”
That was shortly before they escaped to Canada, mere days before a terror attack killed at least 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans near the airport in Kabul.
But many others may not be so lucky.
On Aug. 14, the Afghan government collapsed, overrun by the Taliban, after the U.S. military started pulling out, leaving thousands in the country with little protection under the new regime.
Since then, there’s been a rush to evacuate soldiers, personnel, contractors and Afghan citizens who helped Americans, plus other civilians. Over the last two weeks, some 114,000 people have been relocated.
“This is a wrong, wrong decision right now,” Faizy said, “not just because I’m an Afghan woman, no, because right now … it’s like more about the world.”
In February 2020, then-President Donald Trump agreed with the Taliban that the U.S. would pull out by May 1. Biden extended that, but Faizy said that’s still too soon.
“For 20 years, we struggle, we suffer, but we did we had some achievements some good achievements. I wouldn’t say that everything was perfectly good — we had corrupt people in the government — but you know, we were moving,” Faizy continued. “We said, like in English,’ baby steps, we were not ready to run.'”
Faizy was born and raised in Afghanistan, becoming at age 17 the youngest woman elected to the Kandahar City Council. She’s served as a leading spokesperson for women’s rights in her home country and now fears for their future.
“It’s going to be so difficult for them to, like, you know, put up with all new rules of the day — they say Sharia law, but it’s not a Sharia law, it’s their own,” she said of the Taliban.
She traveled to the United States in 2016 as part of the State Department’s International Visitor’s Program, and eventually she was selected for the Bush Fellowship program in Dallas for women from the Middle East. She said her experience as a young adult here is worlds different than her experiences in Afghanistan.
“I grew up in the war,” she said. In the U.S. “people that age, even my age, you know, people still, like, they don’t think about the world.”
Still, she remains hopeful.
“The good thing in Afghanistan is the unique culture,” she said. “No matter in what situation, we will be we will always keep that culture, no matter where we go, we will always have that culture because it’s in our blood.”
“I have a hope for a future of Afghanistan … women in the new generation, we still have a chance.”
(NEW YORK) — A new, peer reviewed study estimates that the delta variant of COVID-19 doubles the risk of being hospitalized compared to the prior alpha variant among unvaccinated people.
The delta variant is the most highly transmissible strain seen yet, first emerging in India in late 2020 and quickly sweeping the globe. But scientists have debated whether this variant is also deadlier.
Preliminary studies from Scotland and Canada hinted that this version of the virus might be making people sicker, but some researchers said this could also be explained by the variant’s hyper-transmissibility, which leads to massive COVID surges that overwhelm hospitals.
This new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, adds increased evidence that the delta variant is more likely to send people to the hospital than the previously dominant alpha variant.
This doesn’t apply if you’re vaccinated, researchers say. Vaccines dramatically reduce the risk of hospitalization and death for both the alpha and delta variants. Most of the people in the U.K. study were unvaccinated.
“Our analysis highlights that in the absence of vaccination, any Delta outbreaks will impose a greater burden on healthcare than an Alpha epidemic,” said Dr. Anne Presanis, one of the study’s lead authors and senior statistician, MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, in prepared remarks.
In one of the largest studies yet looking at this question, U.K. researchers analyzed medical records of more than 40,000 COVID cases from March to May, roughly 20% of which were delta variant infections. By measuring what happened to people within 14 days of testing positive, researchers found that people infected with delta were more likely to seek medical care at a hospital or emergency room compared to people infected with the alpha variant.
“This is a large study that suggests a slight increase in [emergency department] visits and hospitalizations among unvaccinated persons infected with delta versus alpha,” said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, executive associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine and Grady Health System in Atlanta.
“But to me, what the paper says more about delta is the fact that vaccines work,” Del Rio said.
In the United States, the delta variant was first identified in March and had become the dominant variant by July. It has led to a massive surge among mostly unvaccinated people, including many young adults and children, who are less likely to be vaccinated than older adults.
“I know from anecdotal reports here in the U.S. that we are seeing more serious infections with the delta variant than the alpha variant, and these data support that,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“I think this is a trend we are seeing in the U.S. where pediatric ICUs are filling up and we are seeing young adults requiring intubation at a much higher rate than with the alpha peak in early 2021,” Durbin said. “I am confident that we are seeing more severe illness in younger people with the delta variant.”
In early August, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said there wasn’t enough data yet to be confident that the delta variant is more serious for children, but preliminary evidence so far is “tipping in that direction.”
The Pfizer vaccine is currently authorized for children ages 12 and older, with authorization for children 5 to 11 expected sometime this winter. Roughly half of children ages 12 to 17 have received their first shot, according to White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients, speaking at Friday press briefing.
-ABC News’ Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.
(KABUL, Afghanistan) — Thirteen American troops were among the nearly 200 people killed in an attack at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on Thursday.
A detonation set off by an ISIS-K suicide bomber near the airport’s Abbey Gate amid evacuation efforts killed at least 170 Afghans, including several children, as well as two Brits and a child of a British citizen, according to Afghan and British officials.
President Joe Biden called the U.S. service members killed in the attack “heroes who have been engaged in a dangerous, selfless mission to save the lives of others.”
Those killed included 11 Marines, as well as an Army soldier and a Navy medic, U.S. officials said.
“Those warriors who died gave their lives to save thousands of men, women and children, Americans and Afghans alike,” Adm. Mike Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said in a statement. “Their courage and selflessness represent the highest ideals of America. We pay solemn tribute to their sacrifice.”
The names of the service members are being released 24 hours after next-of-kin notifications, though some of those killed have been identified by family and officials. Here’s what we know about them so far.
Navy Fleet Marine Force Hospital Corpsman Max Soviak, of Ohio, was “very proud” to serve his country, his mother said in a statement to ABC News.
“He was very passionate about helping his fellow Americans and trying to get them home safely,” Rachel Soviak said. “There are no words to describe the pain our family is feeling. There will forever be a hole in our hearts.”
The family is praying for the troops to arrive home safely, she said.
Max Soviak was a 2017 graduate of Edison High School in Milan, Ohio. School leaders remembered him as “full of life in everything he did.”
“Max was a good student who was active in sports and other activities throughout his school career,” Superintendent Thomas Roth said in a statement. “He was well respected and liked by everyone who knew him.”
Marine David Espinoza was a native of Laredo, Texas, according to Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, who released a statement confirming his death.
“Mr. Espinoza embodied the values of America: grit, dedication, service, and valor,” Cuellar said. “When he joined the military after high school, he did so with the intention of protecting our nation and demonstrating his selfless acts of service.”
Espinoza graduated from Lyndon B. Johnson High School in Laredo in 2019 and is survived by his brother, mother and stepfather, Cuellar’s office said.
Marine Rylee McCollum, of Bondurant, Wyoming, was among the service members killed, Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon confirmed.
“I’m devastated to learn Wyoming lost one of our own in yesterday’s terrorist attack in Kabul,” Gordon said on Twitter. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the family and friends of Rylee McCollum of Bondurant.”
Marine Kareem Nikoui was among those killed in the attack, ABC News has confirmed.
Nikoui “always wanted to be a Marine,” his father, Steve Nikoui, a carpenter in California, told the Daily Beast.
“He was devoted — he was going to make a career out of this, and he wanted to go,” Nikoui told the outlet. “No hesitation for him to be called to duty.”
Marine Cpl. Hunter Lopez was the son of two members of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in Southern California — Capt. Herman Lopez and Deputy Alicia Lopez — the department said.
The 22-year-old planned on “following his parents’ footsteps” and becoming a deputy himself upon returning home from his deployment, Sheriff Chad Bianco said in a Facebook post announcing his death.
As a teen, Lopez was a Riverside Sheriff’s Explorer Scout with the Palm Desert Station. After graduating from La Quinta High School, he joined the Marine Corps in September 2017, Bianco said.
“Like his parents who serve our community, being a Marine to Hunter wasn’t a job; it was a calling,” the Riverside Sheriff’s Association said in a statement. “He loved his family, and as we grieve for Hunter and his fellow Marines taken from us too soon, there are simply no words to express how deeply he will be missed.”
His family is requesting all donations be made to the Riverside County Deputy Sheriff Relief Foundation in their name.
-ABC News’ Alondra Valle and Zunaira Zaki contributed to this report.
The new collection features 11 original tunes written or co-written by Setzer. To coincide with the album’s arrival, Brian has debuted a third single from the project, the old-time country-flavored “Rockabilly Banjo,” along with a companion music video.
Setzer co-wrote the tune with Stephen “Dibbs” Preston, lead singer of the veteran rockabilly band The Rockats. The song, which combines country and rockabilly influences, features some impressive banjo picking by Brian, as well as the talents of lauded pedal-steel guitarist Paul Franklin.
The video, which you can watch on Setzer’s official YouTube channel, features a montage of vintage black-and-white footage of banjo players, including clips of legendary folk artist Pete Seeger.
Explaining how the song came together, Setzer notes, “Me and Dibbs were hanging around, and it was one of the few times ever that someone gives me a song that’s just the music and not the lyrics. And Dibbs said, ‘Hey, you play banjo, I love the way you play it.’ You know, banjo makes everybody smile and everybody’s after me to play more banjo.”
Setzer adds, “And Dibbs said, ‘Hey, I got a song, what do you think of this?’ and I thought ‘Wow! Let’s clean it up.’ So that’s the last track.”
“Rockabilly Banjo” follows Setzer’s two previous singles from Gotta Have the Rumble, “Checkered Flag” and “Smash Up on Highway One,” which also were released alongside companion videos.
A vinyl version of Gotta Have the Rumble is due out in the fall.
Here’s the album’s full track list:
“Checkered Flag”
“Smash Up on Highway One”
“Stack My Money”
“The Wrong Side of the Tracks”
“Drip Drop”
“The Cat with 9 Wives”
“Turn You On, Turn Me On”
“Rockabilly Riot”
“Off Your Rocker”
“One Bad Habit”
“Rockabilly Banjo”
Meek Mill collabos with Lil Baby and Lil Durk on “Sharing Locations,” which dropped Friday, featuring a video he directed.
They’re living the high life in the clip, cash overflowing, riding in a private jet and Rolls Royce and contemplating their next sexual adventure.
“Gave her a pill, they all get high, you ever had a foursome?” they rap. “This too much cash for me to hide, I had to give lil’ bro some”
Also, after Megan Thee Stallion fought in court to have her “Butter” remix with BTS released, the song dropped Friday. The Hot Girl Summer adds her Texas hip-hop flava to the track by the South Korean pop group.
“So smooth like the car I ride.” she raps. “Even ya best party planner couldn’t catch this vibe/
Big boss, and I make a hater stay on they job/ And I be on these girls necks like the back of they bobs.”
Kash Doll is feeling “Single & Happy” which is the title of her new single featuring Wale and Eric Bellinger. The Detroit rapper celebrates female empowerment and relying on a partner for validation in the follow-up to her previous single, “Like a Pro.”
Finally, Baby Keem released “Family Ties,” featuring his cousin, Kendrick Lamar on the track, and Normani in the video.
Lamar raps he’s been quiet since the beginning of the COVID-19 virus. “I been duckin’ the pandemic, I been, social gimmicks/ I been duckin’ the overnight activists, yeah/ I’m not a trending topic, I’m a prophet.”
The 13-time Grammy winner also gives props to Megan Thee Stallion, rapping, “I can multitask like Megan, brother/ 2021, I ain’t takin’ no prisoner/New flows comin’, be patient, brother.
Eddie Murphy reportedly will be teaming up with Jonah Hill for a new comedy that will be directed by black-ish veteran Kenya Barris.
The Hollywood Reporter notes that the three very funny guys will collaborate on an as-yet-untitled project that the trade described as an “incisive examination of modern love and family dynamics and how clashing cultures, societal expectations and generational differences shape and affect relationships.”
Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall vet Hill, who of late has been exploring his more dramatic side on screen, also co-wrote the upcoming film with Barris, who co-wrote the hit sequel Coming 2 America for Murphy.
Kenya also will be making his feature film directorial debut on the film, the trade says.
Disney+ has unveiled the first trailer for Doogie Kamealoha M.D., the Hawaii-set reboot of the Neil Patrick Harris medical dramedy Doogie Howser, M.D.
The sneak peek kicks off with Andi Mack veteran Peyton Elizabeth Lee as the title character, saving a man’s life on an O’ahu beach, with the help of a sunbather’s hair pin.
The original show even gets name-dropped in the trailer, with people calling the 16-year-old doctor as “a real-life Doogie Howser.”
The trailer shows how the series will see the young doctor will be “juggling a budding medical career and life as a teenager,” including using the scientific method to deduce whether a guy likes her, in-between her rounds at the hospital.
The series, which also stars a diverse cast including Kathleen Rose Perkins, Jason Scott Lee, Matthew Sato, Wes Tian, Emma Meisel and Ronny Chieng, debuts on Disney+ on September 8.
The original Doogie Howser, M.D. ran for four seasons on ABC, from September 19, 1989, to March 24, 1993.
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. intelligence agencies remain “divided on the most likely origins of COVID-19,” after President Joe Biden’s 90-day push for his intel community to “redouble their efforts” to find a more definitive conclusion regarding the source of the virus.
In a declassified summary released late Friday afternoon, the agencies said that two hypotheses for the virus’ origin remain possible: either natural exposure to an infected animal, or an accidental lab leak.
Four elements of the U.S. intelligence community said with “low confidence” that COVID-19 was initially spread from an animal to a human, while one element assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection was the result of a “laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” and pointing to the “inherently risky nature of work on Coronaviruses.”
The agencies, however, generally agreed that the virus was most likely not developed as a biological weapon, and that China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic.
Barring new information, said the report, a more definitive explanation will not be possible without Beijing’s cooperation.
Biden, responding to the report, said that efforts to identify the cause of the virus will continue.
“While this review has concluded, our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest,” Biden said. “We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again.”
Referring to China, the president said, “Responsible nations do not shirk these kinds of responsibilities to the rest of the world. Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”
But international scientists tasked with studying the virus’ origins warned Wednesday that a crucial window is “closing fast”: the shrinking opportunity for any thorough scientific study to be completed. As time wears on, potential evidence wanes, and tracing back biologic breadcrumbs will yield diminishing returns, said more than ten of the authors of a World Health Organization-led report that is urging action to “fast-track the follow-up scientific work required” for better answers by the WHO.
Assessing the intelligence and raw data available this spring, it became apparent to Biden and his top officials that a large cache of information had yet to be fully analyzed, officials told ABC News — including potential evidence that could hold clues to the virus that has now claimed more than four million lives worldwide.
Consensus among top officials in the Biden administration has been that the pandemic originated in one of two ways: The virus emerged from human contact with an infected animal, or from a laboratory accident.
But with no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.
Following Biden’s call for clarity in May, intelligence agencies have spent the last three months poring over an untapped trove of information, and have amassed classified records and communications, genomic fingerprints of the virus, and early signals as to where and when the virus may have flared up first.
Biden’s August deadline marks zero hour for the next phase of a larger international quest: to trace back the virus in order to hold the responsible parties to account, and to understand its inception in order to prevent the next one.
Any emerging answers, however, come amid a roiling geopolitical debate, as COVID-19’s origins have become a contentious wedge issue at home — while abroad, the Chinese government vehemently denies the virus could have come from one of its labs.
“What the U.S. cares about is not facts and truth, but how to consume and malign China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Wednesday ahead of the U.S. report, claiming that China had welcomed collaborative research which “laid the foundation for the next-phase global origins tracing work.”
The Chinese government rejected the World Health Organization’s proposed audits of Wuhan’s labs in July, part of the UN agency’s recommended phase two study — saying they could not accept needless “repetitive research” when “clear conclusions” had already been reached.
But there have been no definitive conclusions as to where COVID-19 came from. The joint WHO-led team presented a range of options in their March report, calling a lab leak “extremely unlikely,” but offering pathways for further investigation. Team members have voiced frustration with the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government — echoed in international criticism that politics had stymied science.
Since then, the WHO has become increasingly receptive to the possibility that the virus resulted from a lab leak. In July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that ruling out a lab leak theory was “premature” and recommended audits of the Wuhan labs in further studies. China’s subsequent rebuff left the WHO to proceed without them.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has underscored that the U.S. will continue the “diplomatic spadework” of rallying support for the WHO-led study — while warning that the administration will not accept Beijing’s stonewalling.
“Either they will allow, in a responsible way, investigators in to do the real work of figuring out where [COVID-19] came from, or they will face isolation in the international community,” Sullivan told Fox News in June.
A group of bipartisan lawmakers urged Biden not to let this month’s deadline hamstring a thorough investigation.
“If the 90-day effort you have announced does not yield conclusions in which the United States has a high degree of confidence, we urge you to direct the intelligence community to continue prioritizing this inquiry until such conclusions are possible,” Sens. Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Jim Risch (R-Idaho) and Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wrote in a late July letter to the president.
Asked about the report’s release, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it would take “several days” for an unclassified and collated version to come together, but that agencies were working “expeditiously to prepare that.”
With no definitive proof of the virus’ origin, scientists and policymakers alike have been left to speculate. Some of the first COVID-19 clusters occurred around Wuhan’s wet markets, where exotic wild fare was sold in close quarters, offering ample opportunity for the virus to jump from animals to humans, as in past epidemics.
No direct animal host for COVID-19 has been identified, and if there is one, it could take years to find, experts say. While environmental samples from the Wuhan markets tested positive, animal samples that were tested did not. Transmission earlier on and within the wider community would suggest the market was not the original source of the pandemic, experts say.
In late summer and early autumn of 2019, satellite imagery shared exclusively with ABC showed dramatic spikes in auto traffic around major Wuhan hospitals — suggesting the virus may have been spreading long before the world was alerted. U.S. intelligence officials had already been warning that a contagion was sweeping through the region as far back as late November 2019, changing patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the populations, according to sources briefed on the matter.
Proponents of the lab-leak theory point to gain-of-function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a controversial study that amplifies a virus’ potency to understand how to neutralize it better. They also point to concerns over biosafety at the WIV’s facilities, where researchers had worked with bat coronavirus samples 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2 — as well as workers at the lab who were hospitalized with “symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses” in November 2019.
Advocates of zoonotic origin, however, emphasize that the 4% discrepancy means a world of genetic difference — and WIV lead researcher Shi Zhengli insists that she tested all her workers for COVID-19 antibodies, and all tests came back negative.
Despite pressure to approach the “high degree of confidence” desired by the public and requested in the lawmakers’ July letter, such certainty remains elusive — something presaged by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines in an interview with Yahoo News earlier this summer.
“We’re hoping to find a smoking gun,” Haines said. “It’s challenging to do that.”
-ABC News’ Josh Margolin, Karson Yiu, James Gordon Meek, Eric M. Strauss, Ben Gittleson and Molly Nagle contributed to this report.
