The lab leak is back in the news as a U.S. intelligence agency alters its assessment to state that the coronavirus likely originated from a laboratory leak.
The Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence is considered authoritative by many as it is involved in biological threats, overseeing a network of 17 laboratories encompassing research in advanced biology, as well as managing the safety of the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the agency’s new assessment was made with “low confidence”, according to people who have read the classified report.
The FBI is the only other U.S. intelligence agency to conclude that the lab leak is the most likely scenario. A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified in October 2021 stated that “one IC [Intelligence Community] element assesses with moderate confidence that COVID-19 most likely resulted from a laboratory associated incident involving WIV or other researchers — either through exposure to the virus during experiments or through sampling”. This element was subsequently identified by the New York Times as the FBI.
U.S. officials on Monday declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each says an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.
Four other agencies in the U.S. still believe that the pandemic was a result of natural zoonotic spillover and two others are undecided, according to the Wall Street Journal. One of the agencies that remains undecided is understood to be the CIA.
Asked about the latest report on CNN on Sunday, Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser, acknowledged that a variety of views are held by the U.S. intelligence community on the origins of the pandemic.
Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other, and a number have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure… Right now there is not a definitive answer to emerge from the intelligence community.
Gilles Demaneuf of DRASTIC spotted back in December that a footnote to the report by the House Intelligence Committee on the Intelligence Community’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak noted that at least one intelligence agency had revised its assessment since the above-mentioned ‘Biden report’ that was declassified in October 2021.
From the latest reports, this agency appears to be the Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. Demaneuf links the change in its assessment to the publication of the DEFUSE funding proposal by DRASTIC in September 2021, which detailed a 2018 plan by U.S. and Chinese researchers to find bat-borne coronaviruses in the wild and insert their spike proteins into existing bat coronaviruses to make them infectious to humans.
But how significant is the changed assessment, really? With most intelligence agencies still apparently favouring a natural origin, the Energy Department only having low confidence in a lab leak, no fresh intelligence or analysis being published and the FBI and Energy Department coming to the conclusion for “different reasons”, the one thing that is for sure is that U.S. intelligence does not have anything approaching definitive proof of a lab leak that it is secretly sitting on (or if it does it is making a good show of not having it).
It’s also worth noting that the FBI’s assessment of “moderate confidence” of a lab leak was said not to involve any engineered viruses but only the leak of natural viruses stored in the lab. This implies it placed no weight on evidence of manipulation or engineering of viruses. The Senate minority staff report on Covid origins from October 2022 stressed alleged evidence of safety issues and poor safety practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and this may be the evidence the FBI was relying on in its assessment. Whether the Energy Department’s newly revised assessment for “different reasons” is based on evidence of manipulation of viruses is unclear as the report has not been made public.
But in any case, as I have noted previously, while the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is an engineered virus is compelling – it has no known animal reservoirs despite extensive searching, it is well-adapted to humans in its earliest recorded cases with no signs of the early genetic diversity that such adaptation would produce, and it is unusually contagious by virtue of having, among other things, a furin cleavage site, which is unknown in SARS-like viruses but often added by scientists to increase infectiousness – the evidence that it came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in particular is missing.
There is no evidence the WIV was working on SARS-CoV-2 or a precursor to it (and no reason to hide it before the pandemic), and it’s clear the Chinese did not behave in December and January as you would expect if they already knew a highly infectious engineered virus from their lab was on the loose. Senior WIV researcher Dr. Shi Zhengli swiftly published the virus genome in January 2020 alongside that of RaTG13, the closest known virus (at the time) to SARS-CoV-2, and drew attention to the similarities and the fact that it is unlikely the novel virus emerged naturally from the sampled virus.
When in April 2020 leading U.S. virologist Dr. Ralph Baric appeared to point the blame at Dr. Shi Zhengli’s lab in a Newsweek report, she shot back an email to him, now in the public domain, pointing out (correctly) that the earlier work manipulating coronaviruses was done in his lab, not hers. She claimed to have been transparent with all her research.
While we obviously shouldn’t take her word for it on this, it’s fair to say that her team was relatively quick to publish details about the new virus in early 2020, whereas U.S. scientists have consistently failed to cooperate with all investigations into virus origins. Jeffrey Sachs even disbanded the Covid origins taskforce which formed part of the Lancet Covid commission he was chairing, perceiving severe conflicts of interest among the U.S. scientists involved and a basic lack of cooperation.
The latest shift to a “low confidence” assessment by the Energy Department for unstated reasons changes nothing about what we know. The timing would even make the cynical wonder if it was done more to increase diplomatic pressure on China as it looks set to provide lethal aid to Russia.
As I see it, the most pressing question on Covid origins – which could be answered without any cooperation from China at all – is what the U.S. is hiding by all its obfuscation and refusal to cooperate or investigate. The fact that U.S. intelligence analysts claimed to have been tracking the virus since November 2019, despite it being plain that the outbreak was not detectable at the time, have given many cause for suspicions about how the U.S. knew about the outbreak at that point. How this engineered virus came to be in Wuhan remains as much of a mystery as ever, but as long as the U.S. maintains its wall of silence on investigating origins, the suspicions of the world will fall not only on China.
A recap of our recent series on the origins of the virus and the potential role of the United States.
- “How Did U.S. Intelligence Spot the Virus in Wuhan Weeks Before China?” – Looks at what the U.S. knew and when.
- “U.S. Accidentally Proves It Could Not Have Spotted the Virus in China in November 2019” – Revisits the Harvard study that claimed to back up the claims of U.S. intelligence to have detected the outbreak in November 2019.
- “U.S. Government Identified as Original Source of Lab Leak Theory. What’s Really Going On?” – Unpicks the activity of U.S. intelligence and Government officials in relation to the lab leak theory.
- “Why the Lab Leak Theory is Almost Certainly False” – Makes the case for an engineered virus but against a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
- “Does China’s ‘Cover-Up’ of the Lab Leak Betray its Guilt?” – Rebuts claims that the Chinese engaged in an incriminating cover-up from the beginning of 2020.
Plus two posts on the evidence of early spread around the world in late 2019.
- “The Evidence COVID-19 Was Spreading Silently Around the World in Late 2019” – Overview of the early spread evidence and what it means for the behaviour of the virus.
- “How We Know it Started in Wuhan” – Why, despite the evidence of early spread globally since at least November 2019, the virus likely first emerged in Wuhan.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
I’m confused, how does 10% of people disembarking a flight test positive, they all caught in in mid air or the tests are bogus (pre-departure, post departure, or all of the above!)?
Yeah.. half a dozen PCR tested ‘cases’ in Botswana, and within the blink of an eye the West has declared a state of emergency and are locking down borders. You’ve got to hand it to these globalists they really have got a fair sized club of useful idiots to call on..
I don’t think you’re alone. It’s what the collapse of a narrative looks like.
Collapse of the narrative?
You must be joking.
NOTHING has made sense since April 2020 when it became very apparent that the covid death was somewhere around 0.2-0.3%.
Everything since then has been the Mad Hatters Tea Party.
The death rate is a bad flu if that but we act as if it were Ebola.
The PCR test is dodgy as hell but we act as if it were dead accurate
Masks don’t do jack but we act as if they are life saving devices
The jabs don’t stop infection or transmission but we have regulations treating the jabbed as not infectious.
The jabs produce terrible side effects at an unprecedented rate but everybody denies their existence.
Footballers collapse at an unprecedented rate and we are told it’s a coincidence.
Everything is mad. Completely mad.
And you think that a story of 10% testing positive on a flight is a sign of the collapse of the narrative?
It’s just more evidence that the perpetrators of this madness can say anything they want and no one will question them.
Collapse… I wish.
I understand your pessimism Stewart but I think patience is the key here.
When I was a sceptic back in March 2020 there were very few of us, but we’ve made slow, steady progress to grow into a sizeable force against behemothic state and MSM propaganda.
The reason it’s taking so long is that many have the same mindset as those who’ve experienced fraud: it’s absolutely clear what has happened but they simply do not want to believe it.
I would like to know what tests were done on departure and on arrival, does anyone know how they test for a variant ?
Hmmm
It’s that old magician’s trick, ‘make ’em watch this hand’.
Good grief. The script seems set in stone. It’s like watching a really, really bad play, over, and over, and over… We might even call it Groundhog Play.
So I guess the zero-covid fundamentalists have access to the levers of power and are winning after all.
Every now and then someone in authority will come out and offer some platitudes about living with the virus, that it’s endemic. But behind them there is a powerful interest group with an enormous amount of power that isn’t allowing a retreat.
It’s zero-covid whether we like it or not.
Didn’t the South African doctor who discovered the new variant say it was very mild? A bit like the common cold. Perhaps we should lock down every time we get a new common cold.
I was planning suicide last year. Wrote a will and it took months to get it done because covid. Sorted now. If we’re going to do this every year I’m going to opt out. Can’t cope with months of no human contact.
Same here. I’m not prepared to live like this either! I’be spent the past 18months waking up each morning wondering what the government is going to screw us over with. Last night just made feel even worse. Really don’t want to be alive right now.
I know what it is like to feel that way, but I promise you that there will be better times; for that to happen though we have to remain defiant in the face of adversity, stick together and keep trying to find ways of getting other people to see how absurd this all is.
Take a break from all media (inc here), get more exercise and learn something new. And if you need a friend, then reach out to the people on this website to see if there is somebody local who is up for a chat, walk, coffee or beer.
I was going to ask about this. What’s the best way for us to meet new friends locally? Many of us are desparate to meet like-minded people face-to-face.
The wonderful Unjected has a dating app, which is also good for making new friends, but most users are across the pond.
There is a meet fellow sceptics section on the forums. Put up a message.
Try stand-in-the-park.
Home – A Stand In The Park
They have a list of all stands and if you went along to your local stand, you’d hopefully meet up with some like minded local people.
It’s basically people who believe in freedom standing around on a Sunday morning.
Well for a start they shouldn’t exclude the vaxxed. There are people on this site who are vaxxed but still sceptical.
It’s hypocritical – albeit understandable – for us to persecute the vaxxed for their decision when we’re rightly complaining about being persecuted for ours.
Ultimately it’s a personal decision which shouldn’t be judged by others either way.
Yes, I would advise a break from the news, including this site. There is a lot of normal life out there.
I think they will try to put pressure on us this winter, so my plan is to get through to the spring. No one should make a drastic decision at this time of year, when it gets darker every day. Wait till the spring once things open out again. I do not believe they can keep this going much longer, I think by the spring there will be too many whistleblowers, their plans will be falling apart, and things will be getting better.
I understand how you feel but all is not lost. Have courage, find like-minded people to gather with. Don’t focus so much on this. Get a pet, go for a walk, pray. God is out there and he is listening to those who cry out to him for help. All the best.
No, don’t do it. Please find a group of like-minded people. They are out there. I agree we can’t live without human contact but it’s far better to find human contact than to end it all. I can personally say I’ve felt similar but my faith in God, church family, and the opposition group I gather with weekly give me hope and encouragement. You’re not as alone as you think, please don’t let despair win.
Strangely – or perhaps, typically – over the past two years, despite everything, I’ve not dallied with suicidal ideation.
Quite the opposite.
Per Lydon, ‘anger is an energy’ and, after 19 months of this endless, circular shit-show, mine is off the charts.
I want to see some people (if you can still call them people) suffer.
And I don’t give a damn.
Anger is an energy.
That’s a t-shirt.
My blood is also boiling, I cannot wait for some people to get their redemption and I for one want to be one of the ones dishing it out
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59450418 mandatory masks in shops again from Tuesday some 4 days after the two “cases” were first detected.
We’re doomed. Doomed, I tell thee. FFS
We know nothing, except that we must proceed with maximum tyranny, based on nothing more than our own fraudulent assertions about a novel virus, which is not noticeable in society and for which there is no true evidence, but which lives in the minds of the majority we have hypnotised, so we can do what we want, and they never figure it out, so we just keep rinsing and repeating the same tired old tricks, laughing in their faces all the way.
“Omicron Variant Spreads to Denmark And The Netherlands – And Could Lead to Restrictions Tightening in Europe”
Yada yada yada
Reuters reporting Japan is at 1% of its COVID peak cases and falling. India is at 3% of its peak and falling. What did these countries do? Ditch vaccine mandates for ivermectin. Since April 28, India medical officials started providing hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin to its massive population. As India is the major pharmaceutical manufacturer in the world, they were ready for this massive drug distribution. MIRACULOUSLY!, COVID cases have plummeted quickly since then. Meanwhile, all “first world” countries in Europe are reporting a rise in cases. Get your ivermectin before it is too late https://ivmpharmacy.com
If the Omicron variant is named after a letter of the Greek alphabet, as the Alpha, Delta, etc. strains were then it’s roughly the 15th variant of interest/concern (I’m not all that familiar with the Greek alphabet). Given that very few of the other variants became widespread it seems very suspicious that there is such a panicked over reaction to this one. Possibly the people at the heart of the conspiracy/cock up felt that project fear was starting to loose it’s effect and needed ramping up.
…possibly?
335300+ mutations and only 15 variants? (ref HART)
Enough for NY State to declare a SoE with no prior known cases; what on earth would they do if a really infectious disease broke out?
A total load of nonsense. Please read anything by Steve Kirsch on sub stack. Avoid MSM written tv or radio.
It occurred to me yesterday that the symptoms of this new variant (fatigue and s mild cough for a day or two) are about as severe as the after-effects of having one of the Covid shots, which people are perfectly willing to accept…
A perverse incentive of mandating restrictions once more, trammelling freedoms and normalising even further restrictions is herding the intelligent into inaction by discussing this issue or that issue, or whether x% is not the true figure as it is out of date.
Stop it.
All you need to know is that if this is being driven by incompetence, out they go and if it’s being driven by an agenda, out they go. It’s out they go whatever the rhetoric. You know it’s all wrong. You know it’s all unethical. You *know* it will lead to more restrictions. You know the vaccine pass will be linked to your CO2 travel footprint and your bank account via CBDCs, with 4IR just around the corner and UBI. Do something about it.
I’m not sure that there’s much point in publishing verbatim rehearsals of MSM stories like this. WE know what the narrative is.
What needs more emphasis is facts exposing the bullshit of the cold that is the ‘Omicron variant’.
Or reading this and passing on:
https://doctors4covidethics.org/long-term-persistence-of-the-sars-cov-2-spike-protein-evidence-and-implications/