Journalist Michael Shellenberger wrote on Public that the FBI may have been notified about a Wuhan lab leak in March 2020.
Public was informed by several sources that the FBI knew that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak.
A Chinese national serving as an FBI informant revealed to the bureau that a “person working at the Virology Institute lab in Wuhan, China was infected, left the building, and spread the virus outside the lab in Wuhan.” The informant added that “[i]t didn’t have anything to do with the wet market or the bat soup story they were going with.”
The sources familiar with the matter told the investigative outlet that they are concerned over “abuses of power within the FBI,” Public wrote.
FBI agents trusted the informant because the information had been corroborated numerous times.
“The [confidential human source] was from Wuhan, had been vetted, and the person had provided information on three prior occasions that they were able to corroborate as true and reliable,” the sources, who told Public they wished to remain anonymous, explained.
Another individual close to the matter added that the FBI believed the information to be “good intel.”
A June report suggested the first individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 may have been Chinese scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV): Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
The publication claimed that “the first people infected by the virus, ‘patients zero,’ included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV’s ‘gain-of-function’ research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.”
U.S. government sources affirmed with certainty that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019.
COVID-19 as the result of a lab leak was also discussed during a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing.
Dr. Robert Redfield, the former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), testified that the COVID-19 virus most likely originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.
“Based on my initial analysis of the data, I came to believe and I still believe today that it indicates that COVID-19 more likely was the result of an accidental lab leak than a result of a natural spillover event,” said Redfield.
Redfield explained that several unusual events occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in September 2019, just months before the pandemic began.
“In Sept. 2019, three things happened in that lab. One is they deleted the sequences. Highly irregular, researchers don’t like to do that,” Redfield said.
“The second thing is they changed the command and control from civilian to military. Highly unusual.”
“The third, which is very telling, is they let a contractor redo the ventilation system in that laboratory. Clearly, there was strong evidence that a significant event happened in that laboratory in September,” he added.
