Report: U.S. Intel Agencies Examine Genetic Data from Wuhan Lab in Search for Coronavirus Origins

American intelligence agencies have begun reportedly deciphering genetic data from the Wuhan Lab to confirm the origin of the Chinese coronavirus.

Still unclear how intelligence agencies obtained “access to the information,” the “giant catalog of information contains genetic blueprints drawn from virus samples studied at the lab in Wuhan,” CNN reported. “But the machines involved in creating and processing this kind of genetic data from viruses are typically connected to external cloud-based servers — leaving open the possibility they were hacked.”

A “source familiar with the investigation” told CNN the most valued data in the tranche is “genetic sequencing, database entries and contextual information about the provenance of the samples and the time and context in which they were acquired,” or in layman’s terms, intelligence that would be used to confirm the origins of the Chinese virus.

CNN continues to describe the challenges of deciphering the data:

Still, translating this mountain of raw data into usable information — which is only one part of the intelligence community’s 90-day push to uncover the pandemic’s origins — presents a range of challenges, including harnessing enough computing power to process it all. To do that, intelligence agencies are relying on supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Labs, a collection of 17 elite government research institutions.

There’s also a manpower issue. Not only do intelligence agencies need government scientists skilled enough to interpret complex genetic sequencing data and who have the proper security clearance, they also need to speak Mandarin, since the information is written in Chinese with a specialized vocabulary.

The genetic data of 22,000 virus samples from the Wuhan lab, which was deleted from the internet by China in 2019, has “long been sought” by the United States. China has, of course, withheld all of the raw data pertaining to early coronavirus cases. – READ MORE