The FBI announced the capture of Ten Most Wanted Fugitive Arnoldo Jimenez after he was taken into custody without incident in Monterrey, Mexico on January 30.

FBI Chicago, FBI San Antonio, the FBI's Legal Attaché in Mexico City, and the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois collaborated to locate Jimenez. He was later arrested by agents of the Fiscalía General de la República (FGR), in conjunction with Interpol. Jimenez will remain in custody pending extradition proceedings. Details

"We had to build a foundation for the investigation,” said Fowler. “We had to go back in time, preceding the start of the pandemic, to understand China’s scientific capability regarding the research on the coronavirus and who was involved.”

Analyst N. Baglioni, who has a master’s degree in biodefense, was confident his team could find those answers. Given researchers must “publish or perish,” Baglioni and his team went “back in time” by delving into scientific and medical journals.

“We learned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology [WIV], located in Wuhan, China, had been a prolific publisher of coronavirus research for many years,” he said. Wuhan was where the first cases of COVID-19 occurred.

“One of the main goals was to figure out what was going on in the coronavirus research lab prior to the pandemic,” Baglioni said. Identifying U.S.-based coauthors or anyone who visited or conducted research at WIV became their first step.

As Baglioni turned up leads on the individuals he found, Fowler asked an agent to interview them. “I needed someone who had the scientific background and could meet with high-level scientists and ask the right questions,” she said.

So, B. Smythe joined the team. The interviews had to be in-person because of the nature of some questions. Although Smythe was concerned he might bring the virus back to his family, he began booking flights.

In February 2023, former Director Wray revealed in a Fox News interview that the Bureau assessed with medium confidence that the virus originated from a lab-associated incident. By that point, the team members had worked tirelessly to:

• Conduct more than 200 interviews with 83 individuals;
• Draw from every intelligence capability, from signals to open-source intelligence;
• Collect and analyze many terabytes of global genetic sequencing data; and
• Write and disseminate numerous intelligence products.

The work was carried out with employees across 18 field offices, five Headquarters divisions and other government agencies. Many employees involved had advanced degrees in fields such as biodefense, biosecurity and biosafety, microbiology, immunology/virology, genetics, zoology and forensic toxicology.

After nearly a year combing through data, intelligence, records and interviews, the WMDD team knew they needed an independent red cell to review the work and add input. The red cell’s members were field analysts who had not collected the data; they did not have preconceived notions about it. They arrived at the same assessment as the WMDD-led team.

The final assessment rested on five “pillars”:

• The nature of coronavirus research at the WIV;
• The unsafe practices at the lab;
• The virus’s single genetic lineage;
• Factors related to geography and the bats that the virus was linked to; and,
• The spate of early illnesses at the lab.

Not content with just identifying COVID’s origin, the team went on to push for policy changes in how the U.S. funds such research after they found loopholes in those policies.

WIV CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH

Coronaviruses have caused respiratory tract infections for thousands of years. They originate in animals, mostly bats, and are found worldwide, including in southeast Asia, particularly in China’s Yunnan province where bats carrying the viruses dwell in the region’s many caves.

Seven coronaviruses are known to have infected humans, all of which originated with bats. SARS-like (severe acute respiratory syndrome) coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, are commonly associated with horseshoe bats that proliferate in the Yunnan province.

Scientists study viruses that could cause a pandemic by engineering them to be more contagious. The work, called gain-of-function research, is typically done under highly controlled conditions and stringent biosafety guidelines in the U.S.

The goal is to see how a virus could evolve and then learn how to detect and defeat it before it causes a pandemic.

The journal articles Baglioni’s team found showed that the WIV researchers engineered a new series of SARS-like coronaviruses by replacing the spike gene of one virus, called WIV1, with spike genes from viruses derived from bats in Yunnan province.

The spike gene helps govern how the pointed, crown-like “spikes” on the virus will attach to human airway cells, allowing the virus to invade the cell, replicate itself, spread throughout the body and be transmitted to others.

The WIV researchers then measured the ability of the new coronavirus variants to infect “humanized mice,” which have been engineered and bred to mimic a human airway model for disease studies. One variant they created was four times more lethal in the mice.

“This showed us that the WIV had the capability and desire to engineer unique features into these viruses that would make them more virulent and transmissible,” Fowler said.

Further, by 2017, the WIV researchers had developed a genetic cloning system enabling them to engineer a coronavirus without leaving a genetic trace, Baglioni’s team found.

UNSAFE PRACTICES AT THE WIV

The risky gain-of-function research the WIV described in journal articles requires high levels of physical containment and strict safety measures.

The scientists that Smythe shared the WIV’s articles with were “taken aback,” he said, when they saw the “materials and methods” sections showing the viruses were handled in a biosafety level 2 laboratory.

“Every scientist viewed this practice as dangerous,” he said, “and noted it was prohibited by U.S. standards.”

Labs range up to level 4, where the most virulent pathogens on Earth are handled. A level 2 lab is for moderate risk; many colleges have these labs.

In the U.S., the minimum for working with a virus with pandemic potential is a level 3 lab, with safeguards such as respiratory protection for technicians and shower-in/shower-out facilities.

Ralph Baric, Ph.D., one of the world’s foremost coronavirus researchers, also sounded the alarm by testifying to Congress that he warned the WIV’s leadership before the pandemic that they were conducting research in labs with insufficient biosafety protections.

“Despite these warnings, the WIV leadership ignored the risks of human infection posed by their research in biosafety level 2 laboratories,” said Fowler.

A SINGLE GENETIC LINEAGE

As a virus jumps from host to host in a natural outbreak, it must evolve to survive its new host’s immune system. This typically introduces subtle genetic changes to the virus with each subsequent jump. 

Scientists study these lineages to trace a virus’s pathway, including back to its origins.

For instance, scientists traced the virus that caused the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 epidemic back to a palm civet, a small mammal, served at a restaurant in China’s Guangdong province. Restaurant workers and market vendors there had antibodies to the virus.

The FBI team collected many terabytes of genetic sequences from around the world. They also collected evidence from databases, journals, research proposals and even theses and dissertations, which FBI linguists helped translate.

With so much data, Fowler sought help from a Laboratory Division colleague who works in a cutting-edge bioforensics lab. Realizing the impossibility of compiling and analyzing all the collected DNA sequences, that colleague had his team develop custom software and run the data through tens of thousands of CPUs and graphics processing units. Even so, some datasets took months to analyze.

The data revealed that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically very similar to other SARS-like coronaviruses that had been found in the Yunnan province region in southwest China. Further, SARS-CoV-2 was well adapted to human-to-human transmission from the outset. Lastly, despite China’s robust disease surveillance network, there is no evidence, to date, that the virus ever circulated among animals or humans before the pandemic.

“In previous natural outbreaks, we have seen the introduction of a virus in multiple points of the population and at multiple times, temporally and geographically separated,” Baglioni said. “With this virus and pandemic, there was a single point of entry into the population.”

Also puzzling was that the virus had a “furin cleavage site.” This area on the spike protein allows the virus to enter human airway cells more efficiently, making the virus more transmissible between humans.

The scientists Smythe spoke with had “never seen this site before in SARS-like coronaviruses,” he said. Many questioned if the furin cleavage site happened naturally or by lab manipulation. 

They believed its presence was unique and was “causing the virus to spread like wildfire [among humans],” he added.

In short, Fowler said, “This virus was already well-adapted to humans and took off.”

GEOGRAPHY AND BATS

Previous research published by the WIV in 2019 demonstrated the closest ancestors to SARS-CoV-2 were almost exclusively found in Yunnan province — not in any of the other nearly two dozen sites studied around China.

Geography factored into the WMDD team’s assessment because the horseshoe bats in Yunnan that carry the virus typically don’t migrate more than 15-20 miles. Wuhan, where the WIV is located and the first illnesses occurred, is 1,000 miles away from Yunnan province.

Also, between the Yunnan area and Wuhan are six other provinces, home to 300 million people and thousands of wet markets.

Wet markets are conducive to disease-spread as domesticated and wild animals are sold, slaughtered and butchered there. And, from 2018-19, Smythe said business was brisk since African swine fever had decimated China’s domestic pork production.

Yet, despite China’s robust disease-detection surveillance network, no SARS-like illnesses were reported along the 1,000-mile route before the first illnesses in Wuhan.

Additionally, before the pandemic, WIV researchers had shown it was unlikely the population of Wuhan would be naturally exposed to SARS-like coronaviruses stemming from bats.

“The lack of cases between Yunnan and Wuhan is almost implausible if there was a natural introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population,” said Fowler. “It is more plausible that the pandemic originated near a lab researching the world’s largest collection of bat samples.”

Now-declassified intelligence shows three researchers at WIV experienced illnesses in November 2019 consistent with, but not diagnostic of, COVID-19. The first large cluster of the illness appeared there the next month.

The team assessed the illnesses and the disease timeline were consistent with a possible lab-associated incident.

CLOSING POLICY LOOPHOLES

In 2023, the team was part of a deliberative, multiagency committee that reviewed U.S. policy for funding research into pathogens with “enhanced pandemic potential” or that was “dual use” research that can be used to develop vaccines or bioweapons. 

Congress and the White House tapped the National Security Council (NSC) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to lead the effort.

The committee agreed to broaden the list of pathogens requiring closer oversight from 15 to more than 200. The FBI soon became the “lone agency on a deserted island,” said W. Seong, a program manager in WMDD, as it pushed for two more requirements: an intelligence community review of all high-risk studies and confirmation of the integrity of research labs.

“The researchers had misperceptions of what it meant to share information with the FBI or the intelligence community,” said Seong. “As scientists, we do research because we see the benefits of that research at the end. But without an intelligence background or access to that information, most researchers don’t see the potential negative side of having the types of materials they generate. It’s a different lens.”

Seong, who has a Ph.D. in environmental toxicology, worked to marry the two worlds.

Even after learning about the FBI’s findings on COVID-19’s origins, the committee would not be swayed. For Fowler, the committee hadn’t gone far enough as the investigation into COVID’s origins had revealed loopholes in U.S. policy for funding studies.

So, WMDD began pushing out its assessment in intelligence products. Investigators made the case for the intelligence community to review high-risk research and explained how the community could help funding agencies better assess risk.

Former Deputy Director Abbate, WMDD AD Susan Ferensic, Fowler and Seong eventually presented their recommendations to former Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.

“We didn’t know what to expect. We thought we had to fight for it,” Seong said. “But Sherwood-Randall surprised us all by saying, ‘Thank you, FBI, for all the hard work you and your staff have done laying out the reasons why this needs to happen.’ Then she turned to her staff and said, ‘Make this happen.’”

The resulting policy takes effect in May 2025.

It requires all stakeholders, including researchers, their institutions, their review boards and U.S. funding agencies, to send studies that meet the threshold for review to a committee co-chaired by the FBI, the NSC and the OSTP.

The committee will then vet the risks, examining what the research is, where it’s conducted and by whom. Also, the labs must be either accredited or inspected for the appropriate containment levels and safety mechanisms.

Seong stressed that although some may be tempted to see the policy as “just another document, this is not a paper tiger. We are driving the policies, so they do what we need to ensure the safety of the United States.”

Fowler agreed about the momentousness of the achievement. “An FBI investigative matter has led to a change in national policy,” she said. “That’s important because now there will be accountability for U.S. money spent on research overseas the same as for here.”

“COVID took away so many people,” she added. “Hopefully, the potential for sanctions or penalties will be a deterrent for future incidents.”

She also hopes it brings solace to the families affected by the disease. She lost her father to COVID-19 in 2021.

The investigation remains open but is winding down, Fowler said. “There are people we would like to interview overseas, but I don’t think that will happen. We will remain engaged and pursue any relevant leads if found in the future.

“Although the FBI cannot rule out that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, a natural occurrence is less plausible given the available information,” she said. “We assessed the virus was likely not a bioweapon, but we cannot rule out that it was not engineered.”

Reflecting on this unprecedented work, Ferensic lauded the team’s dedication as “an example of rigor, innovation, partnership and determination to find the facts.”

“They did not stop after the yearslong COVID origins investigation,” Ferensic said. “They continued to push, knowing the American public, and their own families, deserved better policies with better protections.