An exclusive report from The Wall Street Journal shared some startling new information about the intelligence community’s research on the origins of the COVID pandemic.
The analysis also indicated that some of the most important information related to lab leak origins was suppressed despite the arguments making more logical sense than the animal-origin theory pushed by “experts.”
The WSJ expose focused on Jason Bannan, a Senior Scientist in the Forensic Response Section of the FBI Laboratory. He has expertise in microbiology that would be essential in the agency’s investigations into the origins of COVID-19 and the possibility that the gain of function research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology generated the novel coronavirus.
He anticipated his findings would be part of a report given to Biden, who had ordered an urgent assessment by the U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories to determine the pandemic origins seriously. The report was issued in 2021.
It turns out that Bannan would not be allowed to give his assessment to White House representatives, which was interesting because the FBI was the “only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely.”
“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.”A spokeswoman for the Director of National Intelligence’s office said that it wasn’t standard practice to invite representatives from individual agencies to briefings for the president and that divergent views within the intelligence community were fairly represented….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 fact, the three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence based their conclusion on the genetic sequence for a spike protein sequence they determined the scientists in Wuhan could create…based on a paper published in 2008 by the Chinese.
John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien conducted a genomic analysis that 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.This position contrasted with the view of the DIA, however.More than three years on since the review was published, the debate about the origins of Covid is still highly politicised and continues among US agencies and departments, and in Congress where witnesses are being hauled in to give evidence.
It turns out that the information about the spike protein was suppressed by superior officers within the agency, and the scientists were asked not to brief their FBI counterparts.
Information about the possible spike protein manipulation, however, was suppressed by superior officers at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency disagreed with the premise that the virus could have originated in the lab.The medical intelligence scientists were also instructed by superiors not to brief their counterparts at the FBI on their findings, and their recommended edits were not included in the national security report commissioned by Biden…. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has promised to pick up where the House investigation left off and said he plans to use his new chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to delve deeper into what happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and what occurred behind closed doors within federal public health agencies.President-elect Donald Trump and his nominee for health and human services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are also expected to take action prohibiting or severely limiting U.S. funding for gain-of-function research relatively quickly within the new administration.
The WSJ report is chilling if for no other reason, it is essential to identify why the pandemic occurred so that something similar can be prevented.
Those responsible for the stonewalling and obfuscation must be held accountable, and it must be determined why this information was suppressed:
Were they bought off from China?
Were they simply hiding information that would help Trump or hurt their superiors?
Or were there other nefarious reasons? Hopefully, Paul’s investigation and a change in agency leadership will help the free flow of reliable information.
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