The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported that the Biden administration “silenced” those who concluded the COVID-19 virus likely leaked from a lab.
FBI scientist Jason Bannan told the WSJ of the suppressed research, “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. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
A spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence’s office said representatives from individual agencies are not often invited to briefings for the president.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council’s work on Covid-19 origins complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity,” the spokeswoman said.
While the FBI supported the lab leak theory, Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who served as a World Health Organization (WHO) consultant, pushed the zoonotic theory. The WSJ said Keen later left the State Department to become the National Intelligence Council’s Director for Global Health Security. The council had a “central role in organizing the report under the supervision of James Murphy, the national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction.”
The FBI scientists were not the only ones who believed a lab leak was a legitimate theory.
“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,” the WSJ wrote. “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.”
The three scientists, John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien, conducted a genomic analysis and “concluded that the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory.” They found a piece of the spike protein that allows the virus to enter human cells was “constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper,” the WSJ said. According to the scientists, this conclusion suggested that Chinese scientists were conducting “gain of function” research.
A recent report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic acknowledges that the COVID-19 virus “most likely” leaked from a Chinese lab.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) said of the report, “This work will help the United States, and the world, predict the next pandemic, prepare for the next pandemic, protect ourselves from the next pandemic, and hopefully prevent the next pandemic. Members of the 119th Congress should continue and build off this work, there is more information to find and honest actions to be taken.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership. Trust is earned. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust. A future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias,” he continued. “We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must. It can be done.”
