WSJ: Intel Knew COVID Origins All Along

Say, remember when the government and the media treated the lab-leak hypothesis of COVID-19’s origin as a conspiracy theory? At the time, social-media platforms suppressed discussion and debate over that explanation. The media treating anyone who noticed that a deadly and novel coronavirus had emerged in the same place where biologists just so happened to be conducting gain-of-function research on —ta da! — coronaviruses.

The question of origin became so important to foreign policy and epidemiological strategy that Joe Biden ordered the US intel community to do an analysis to pin down the origins of the deadly pandemic. That review concluded with “low confidence'” that it originated in a jump from an animal to humans in Wuhan. But that conclusion came after a scientific study conducted by one of those agencies was never presented to Biden — a study that looked at te virus and proved that it had been the result of manipulation of the same type conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Wall Street Journal exposes the incompetence, or worse:

The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with “low confidence” that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies.  

At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president. 

“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”

Dr. Jason Bannan, an FBI microbiologist and investigator in biological warfare, had already warned that this looked man-made. He had been prepared to go to the White House to lay out the case for the lab leak origin. However, as the story notes, the call never came. For some reason, no one wanted to hear from Bannan despite his expertise and insight into the very mechanisms that create viral weapons.

Only this isn’t really a story about Bannan or the FBI. As it happens, another unit within the Defense Intelligence Agency had gone even further and conducted a full-blown study of the virus, and had reached the same conclusion. The virus itself showed evidence of human manipulation, which when put together with the proximity to WIV made it clear that the pandemic resulted from dangerous methods and shoddy security around them. Only the White House didn’t want to hear that either:

But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal shows that the disagreements among intelligence experts over what should be included in the report ran deeper than is publicly known. Nor were the FBI scientists the only ones who believed that the intelligence directorate’s review didn’t tell the whole story. 

Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden. 

In terms of difficulty, reaching this conclusion would appear to be somewhere around a 1 on a 1-to-10 scale. Intel agencies knew what WIV was and what types of research they performed. The NIAID helped fund the gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, after all, under the guidance of Anthony Fauci. The NIH — NIAID’s parent agency — also knew of serious deficiencies in WIV’s security, which required a Level 4 approach but whose practices routinely fell far short. 

However, the three scientists at NCMI had more evidence than just circumstance, emphasis mine:

Three scientists there—John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien—conducted a genomic analysis that concluded that the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory. Specifically they concluded that a segment of the “spike protein” that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells was constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper. That was an indication, they argued, that the Chinese scientists were conducting “gain of function” research to see if the virus could infect humans.

That is what we used to call evidence. It certainly would be a smoking gun revelation, even to non-intel investigators, if politics were not involved. And yet this, along with Dr. Bannan’s work in parallel, didn’t just get discounted in this August 2021 presidential briefing but entirely suppressed. 

Why? The obvious reason is that Biden didn’t want to confront China over its role in creating the virus as well as refusing to cooperate in fighting it. To conclude that China manufactured the virus would prompt the US to cut off any more cooperation with China on medical research, a step that should have been taken well before the pandemic based on the deficiencies already known at WIV. Biden wanted to differentiate his administration from Trump’s pugnacious China policies, perhaps in no small part because of Biden Inc interests that Hunter Biden had cultivated in the Obama administration. 

Instead of dealing with the obvious, the Biden administration kept insisting on the zoonotic-transfer hypothesis despite a lack of any evidence for it. And then they worked with censorship groups funded in part by the State Department to punish anyone who dissented from that conclusion as “conspiracy theorists” and supposedly dangerous purveyors of “disinformation.” 

And it worked, too. It has taken three years to start getting the truth, and even then only because voters kicked Biden and Harris out of office. The incoming administration will get a chance to look at the records, and the current custodians know it. 

Just imagine what else they’ve been lying about. Hopefully, we’ll find out soon.