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.
7/ Done with the introduction. Let's jump to the interesting bits:
— Gilles Demaneuf (@gdemaneuf) December 21, 2022There is one major piece of information related to the origins that the report tries hard to downplay:
One IC element revised its origin assessment after the publication of the Biden report (Oct 2021).pic.twitter.com/IUvaxNeo61
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.
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What we really know (or rather can logically infer) is that someone knows. It seems unlikely that there is no arm of the mighty US state that has any more concrete information on this matter. So why do they not make this information public?
‘… is that someone knows.’
He’s currently preoccupied with how best to spin the inevitable discovery of US sabotage of Nordstream.
Lol. They know who did that too.
I know what really happened but unfortunately won’t be believed because the truth is simply too mind blowing to contemplate.
It did not originate in a Chinese lab simply because Covid 19 does not, and never has, existed.
Think the medical profession can’t go insane over an imaginary virus?
The one problem is, it’s happened before.
The truth is what happened in 2006 at the Dartmouth Hitchcock medical centre where the PCR was 0% accurate in detecting Whooping Cough and made even worse that this was an easily detected bacterium, not a virus.
It’s called a pseudo epidemic and to understand what has actually occurred all that needs to be done is read the article on what happened at Dartmouth Hitchcock and replace the word Whooping Cough with Covid 19.
If its happened before, it can happen again!
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/health/22whoop.html#:~:text=The%20Dartmouth%20doctors%20sent%20samples,in%20any%20of%20the%20samples.
I wonder how much taxpayer money is being spaffed away by 8 different agencies, each making their own investigations nto the origins of “the virus”, none of which will be of any use whatsoever, except to back up each agency’s own agenda.
One of the millions of ways tax money is misused and wasted.
All part of the repositioning of liars caught out as the truth trickles out and threatens to become a torrent.
Look chaos we are coming clean. And as has Beene mentioned before it is their attempt to control and manage the emerging story so that they can cover up the really bad stuff by blitzing us with the trivial.
…why now? I’m guessing because anti-China rhetoric is building in the USA…
Allegations about Chinese spy balloons, allegations about China sending weapons to Russia. China being the only country talking about peace at the Munich Defence conference, and having their peace proposals thrown back at them…..while the USA failed to get the rest of the world (85%)..on board with their anti Russia, anti China agenda….and in the last three days sending US troops to Taiwan, in a huge incitement to provocation….that’s why now….
I suspect there’s a high chance of conflict around Taiwan before June comes.
Most sane people by now have low confidence that it was a leak.
Pressure must surely build on the US to properly investigate its own involvement.
Michael P Senger….
Glad to hear the establishment is using the Department of Energy for their latest periodic lab leak propaganda push. They seem to be running out. What next, the department of Parks and Recreation?
Every couple months the establishment does these big propaganda pushes for the lab leak theory, though the flimsy underlying evidence hasn’t changed in 2 years, while overwhelming evidence that COVID was spreading globally by mid-2019 only grows stronger. Desperate and pathetic.
The testimony of DRASTIC founder J.J. Couey provides powerful firsthand insight into the perpetuation of the lab leak theory as a controlled opposition narrative.
https://michaelpsenger.substack.com/p/drastic-founder-renounces-lab-leak
At least one of the signatories to the “conspiracy” letter to The Lancet knows the truth. Until admission of guilt is made, all should be treated as accessories to murder.
I have always been suspicious of the pangolin and a bat sex party zoonotic theory and find the “created in a lab” theory much more likely.
I also find the accidental escape from a lab theory doubtful and a full blown economic attack by rogue elements of the US against China much more likely.
Fortunately, Ron Unz has been articulating the same view from the very start.
Here are some of his bullet points and a reference to his comprehensive articles.
https://www.unz.com/runz/why-the-lab-leak-theory-is-almost-certainly-false/
Over the decades America has spent $100 billion creating the world’s largest biowarfare capability.
1) In 2017 Trump brought on board Robert Kadlec, who since the late 1990s had been America’s leading biowarfare advocate.
2) In 2018 and 2019 mysterious viral epidemics devastated China’s poultry and pork industries, severely damaging China’s food supply.
3) From January to August 2019, Kadlec ran the Federal/State “Crimson Contagion” exercise in which our government officials practiced their strategies of protecting American society from infection by a hypothetical dangerous respiratory virus that might suddenly appear in China.
4) In late October 2019, 300 American military servicemen visited Wuhan to participate in the World Military Games.
5) In late October/early November, Patient Zero in Wuhan became infected with Covid. The virus spread invisibly until the Chinese government discovered its presence near the end of December. The Chinese government finally reacted in early/mid-January.
6) In early January 2020, America assassinated Iran’s top military leader, with the retaliatory Iranian missile strike nearly leading to war.
7) In mid/late January 2020, the Wuhan virus suddenly jumped 3,500 miles to the Holy City of Qom, soon infecting Iran’s top political elites, with a number of them dying as a consequence. By February, Iran had become the second global epicenter of the Covid outbreak despite having a negligible Chinese population, while the later outbreaks in Italy and Spain were in locations with hundreds of thousands of Chinese.
8) In early March 2020, the Iranian government publicly accused America of having launched a biowarfare attack with Covid against Iran and China, with a formal complaint being submitted to the UN. However, virtually no Western media reported those accusations, so almost no Americans became aware of them.
9) In early April, four intelligence sources told ABC News that a secret November DIA report had described a “potentially cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan, but this had been ignored by the Trump Administration. Israeli TV confirmed that Israel and NATO allies had received that report, which had been produced “in the second week of November.” But according to best current estimates, at that point only perhaps a dozen people were starting to feel a little sick in Wuhan, a city of 11 million.
We are being given two choices : a) it was an unfortunate accident and b) it was a naturally occurring event. Where is option c?
c) it was a deliberate act and as the classic phrase goes ‘whoever smelt it dealt it’ I know who I think did it.
If c is correct which given what then happened seems by far the most likely then we absolutely definitely need to not get bored with it nor should we get bogged down in options a and b. It has resulted in millions of deaths worldwide from the repercussions.
You don’t include that ‘ex-mate’ of Dr Robert Malone who was nipping around Asia early doors, in fact almost no one mentions him. We also have Russia saying that they have more information on what was going n in the biolabs in Ukraine that they are about to release. Which may be influencing timing of latest narrative.
There is no doubt in my mind that it was a deliberate act by the US.
Frankly this subject is boring.
The C1984 was released, drip-fed or whatever but with one purpose – the genesis of the Davos Deviants Reset. From virus to “vaccines” and all the criminal BS that went with it, lockdowns, masks, jabs, social gatherings and so on.
C1984 was the starting point, we have to deal with now: ULEZ, LTN’s,digital ID and CBDC and food shortages and fuel and travel etc.
Let’s try to get a grip on NOW.
100% hux. It’s how I feel about constantly hearing about lockdowns too. Yes we know the damage they caused but it’s the same psychos behind lockdowns that are behind the death jabs that are behind all the other stuff they’ve got planned for us coming down the pipeline. Harping on about the past and stewing on what we already know is not really helping us fight what lies ahead and what they’re trying to implement right under our noses, as you state above.
Except that achieving change requires mass action, and that can only come as knowledge of wrongdoings becomes cumulative and widespread. Concentrate exclusively on today’s evils and you’re guaranteed to be one step behind the villains in perpetuity.
Every time evidence slowly emerges, it will be yesterday’s news to move on from. Good for permacrisis, but not for change.
Concentrate on building & living an alternative to the one planned. Throw spanners in the works & bring folk along by pointing out the harms to their lives that the cabal will wreak via LTNs etc. Tangible, real harms. Until it hits folk where it hurts, they won’t join in. Local shops, local businesses & local community being damaged does wake folk up.
Trying to wake them up on any of the other issues, zilch. Go for what they’re receptive to, wastes too much precious energy otherwise.
Totally agree BB. Certainly amongst my social circle the majority, and particularly those who are now realising they have been egregiously lied to re covid just want to put the last three years behind them. However, current shenanigans are waking them up, particularly EZ, LTN’s, digital ID’S, CBDC’s etc.
Even the intelligent but dangerously stupid are beginning to smell a rat even if it’s only the tail for now.
Thanks Mogs. We are on the same page. Mind, we always are aren’t we?
I suspect that it was adopted as a convenient happenstance. Hence the pathetic early response (as they’d not decided to use it at that point), followed by a crazy overreaction (when they decided it was going to be useful).
But I wouldn’t discount a deliberate engineering/release, as you suggest.
My money is turning more to deliberate engineering and release.
We know this :-
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/sars-cov-2-was-lab-made-under-project
That article clearly reinforces what we know about COVID being genetically manipulated. It also links to this article which shows that:
A novel coronavirus vaccine was in development at NIAID’s Vaccine Research Center (VRC) no later than 23 July 2019.
A coronavirus vaccine candidate co-owned by NIAID and Moderna was provided to Ralph Baric at UNC 12 Dec 2019 and is described as a significant investment on the part of the providers.
Remember the whole genome of Sars-CoV-2 was not sequenced until 05 Jan 2020. It is obvious that Fauci, Baric and co are involved in this. If Republican politicians have the will and the guts to prove it then the whole pack of cards comes tumbling down.
IMO the important point here is that the early statements that it definitely came from the wet market were wrong.
This in itself would be fine, except that TPTB put enormous efforts into declaring that any other theory was misinformation and any discussions would be quashed.
It is now clear that official pronouncements of the virus’ origin in 2020 were themselves misinformation.
Because of this ‘official misinformation’ there was no real push to get those responsible to tell the world exactly what they were working on. The lack of this information will have led to many months of ‘scrabbling in the dark’ to find a medical response, which will likely have resulted in many hundreds of thousands more deaths.
The ‘counter-misinformation units’ have rather a lot of blood on their hands.
As always, thank you for your quiet voice of reason amongst all the noise and confusion.
They didn’t need a lab leak. They just used a fake PCR test to fake a pandemic. If it was real they would not have needed the fake PCR test
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