According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, spy chiefs say FBI and Pentagon scientists will offer rebuttals to their preferred origin theory of the coronavirus at a major 2021 briefing. It is said that it was prevented.
During the pandemic, some in the Biden administration and scientific establishment officials made a concerted effort to downplay the possibility that the new coronavirus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the coronavirus danger Experiments to acquire functions were also conducted. with American funds.
Those in power have so far cast the most likely explanation as a conspiracy theory, in some cases censoring online discussion, while ultimately suggesting that a cross-species leap into humanity is to blame. I tried my best to do so. If this narrative is officially accepted, it would hold China's communist regime responsible for millions of deaths, Peter Daszak's disqualified EcoHealth Alliance, and numerous others involved in radical experiments at the epicenter of the pandemic. It will help keep it away from US federal agencies.
According to When it came time for intelligence agencies to present their findings to President Joe Biden, intelligence chiefs had concluded with “moderate confidence” that a lab breach was likely the culprit. The FBI was excluded from the Aug. 24 report, the magazine said. In 2021, a briefing was held with a damning genome analysis by Pentagon scientists, again pointing to human error.
Microbiologist Jason Bannan said: worked He worked as an FBI scientist for nearly 20 years, and his boss prepared him for an August intelligence community briefing with Biden, but he was not clear about the origin story of zoonotic diseases. told the Journal that he was not given the opportunity to present contrasting views. It was ultimately promoted by the Director of National Intelligence, former CIA Deputy Director Avril Haines.
A report released earlier this year by Michael Shellenberger's investigative agency Public shows that the agency may have known about the lab breach at WIV as early as March 2020. .
“The FBI has long assessed that the cause of the pandemic was likely a potential laboratory incident in Wuhan,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray. said in Interview in February 2023. “Let me just make the observation that the Chinese government is doing everything in its power to disrupt and obfuscate the work here, the work that we are doing, the work that the United States government and our close foreign partners are doing. . And that's unfortunate for everyone.”
“The FBI will be asked to attend the briefing because it is the only government agency that has assessed a likely laboratory origin and is the one that has expressed the highest level of confidence in the analysis of the origins of the pandemic. We expected it,” Bannan said. . “I think it's surprising that the White House didn't ask.”
Defenders of the zoonotic origin theory may have wanted to limit official attendance at briefings to maintain the credibility of their preferred narrative. As it turns out, the FBI experts apparently weren't serious.
“Scientists who had expertise in the subject were silenced.”
For example, the magazine noted that the National Intelligence Council created a chart to include in its report to Biden that alludes to similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and past zoonotic disease outbreaks. . But FBI experts are said to have suggested that the graph belies a proper understanding of the striking and important differences between the new virus and previous viruses, particularly when it comes to transmissibility.
FBI experts also confounded the opinion of Adrian Keene, a State Department official who previously consulted the WHO and now works at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by highlighting WIV scientist Yu Ping's paper. It seems so. This showed that the virus that causes the pandemic is endemic to China's mountainous Yunnan province in western China. The problem for proponents of the zoonotic origin theory was that the initial outbreak was not in Yunnan province, but near the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei province, nearly 1,000 miles away.
Insights from scientists at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency were similarly poorly received and ultimately swept under the rug.
The journal says that John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien, whose 2020 paper that challenged claims of zoonotic origins was quarantined, conducted genome analysis and found that the virus It pointed out that the results showed that the patient had received the intervention in the laboratory.
The trio, who work at the DIA's National Medical Information Center, believe that the virus's spike protein is not a product of evolution, but rather an ergonomic product created using technology developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and described in a 2008 paper. It was determined that it was a product of Signs of gain-of-function experiments.
The three reportedly briefed their opponents, including one of Bannan's partners at the FBI, while Hardham, Cutlip and Chretien were told in July 2021 that their boss at the Medical Information Center , the FBI was ordered not to disclose any more about their work.
In addition to siloing their research, the National Intelligence Council's briefing to the president reportedly excluded many of the edits proposed by Pentagon scientists.
There appeared to be a desire to conform to the narrative, but a spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence suggested to the Journal that different views would be fairly represented.
Source familiar with the investigation said The New York Post reported that “scientists with expertise in the subject were silenced.”
The NIC report, which Haines and two of her senior analysts submitted to Biden in August, said they were “confident” that the virus was ultimately the result of a jump between species and “probably not genetically modified.” “The degree is low,” he concluded.
“What ends up in the newsroom of the intelligence community needs to be reconsidered,” Bannan said.
The magazine suggested that politics is a factor in approaches to competing theories, both in Washington, D.C. and in the scientific community. then-President Donald Trump proposed In May 2020, he said he had seen evidence that gave him “strong confidence” that the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory.
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