The Energy Department Lab Investigating Covid Knows What It’s Talking About

Last night, it wasn’t hard to find random people on Twitter dismissing the Department of Energy laboratory report in the Wall Street Journal and insisting, “That department has no expertise whatsoever.”

Why would the U.S. Department of Energy be weighing in on an investigation into the origins of Covid-19? The short answer is because the Energy Department has a special division that, as part of its mission to track and mitigate the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, specializes in the study of biological weapons such as viruses.

There are a lot of first-rate research institutions in the United States, but no one would dispute that the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the biggest of the big-time. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, establishing itself as a true military rival to the U.S., and launching the Cold War nuclear-arms race. The University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch, opened September 2, 1952, on the site of a decommissioned Naval Air Station — and quickly became known as one of the two major government-funded labs developing and maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The U.S. intelligence community wanted to know everything it could about Soviet nuclear capabilities and would often turn to Livermore scientists to analyze atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the Soviets as well as soil samples. The site was renamed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1971.