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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Lockdown is primarily an assault on the mind, hence the bombardment of absurdities and goalpost-shifting.
“Assault on the mind”.
Yes, even I felt a bit anxious going in a supermarket today without wearing a “lanyard” for the first time in a while today. What chance have children got in coping with the horrors of the last 15 months? Stories like this bring it home, and I’m so grateful to the places and people who have been able to give them some sort of normality in these dark times.
Well done for ditching the lanyard! How was it?
You have to remember that 5 year olds have spent the last quarter of their lives locked up in their homes. It’s mostly all they know.
Not to mention their mask-wearing parents. Disgraceful.
A whole cohort of babies born over the last 15 months have not seen normal faces. Not been smiled at by other adults.
Like the mad woman I am, I always seek out small kids and babies in the supermarket entirely in order to smile at them.
Not mad. Just human. Mind you my husband had a slightly different experience in Aldi the other day. He caught the eye of a little boy in a trolley, so he smiled and said “hello”. The little boy retorted in the gruffest, deepest voice, ” SHUT UP!” My husband actually thought it was funny, he was so outspoken, but realised it was probably a protective thing, not being used to seeing unmasked faces!
I have put this up before so forgive me for repeating myself, but this was such a defining moment. A while ago when I was outside a supermarket with all the face naps, a young dad walked past pushing a stroller, fully masked up and totally engrossed on his phone. His baby was sitting up and looking around. He saw me maskless and gave me a huge smile. I smiled and winked back and he really chuckled. It was a lovely moment but so sad too, as dad was totally oblivious, as too it seemed, all the other faceless ones with kids.
It’s a damned disgrace! All for nothing!
Where does the Cambridge couple stand on this atrocity? I thought mental health was their great cause.
Only when it makes for a good photo op.
Less than nothing.
I remember being scared and nervous when I went to school for the first time.
I don’t remember being referred to a psychologist. My mother knew that new experiences were unnerving for children, and that I’d get over it. It took me a day. It took my sister a week when her turn came.
I’m so glad we were children at a time when childhood existed.
Ditto going to secondary school and starting new jobs.
9 schools/7 jobs myself.
It’s no longer seen as normal to be a bit scared, stressed, upset it all needs to be packaged up, labelled at treated like an illness. Probably more money in that for someone.
I was a timid child, I was put on a bus at 11 and sent to a huge (2000 pupil) secondary school 20 miles away, I was the only child from my primary school to go there, it was terrifying. I survived and started to gain confidence i even made friends, before being moved again less than a year later. Many kids today have it too easy, so they don’t have the mental tools to deal with adversity.
That doesn’t of course mean that any of this fear propaganda has been needed or is in anyway right.
“Many kids today have it too easy”
Please don’t do the whinging old fart routine.
We were never put through what this young generation are suffering, and my constant sadness is that children’s lives are generally now much more limited and controlled than mine was, when, from the age of about eight, I was able to disappear across the landscape with mates for a whole day without anybody having a melt-down. Many children now are never allowed to breath without adult intervention. Schooling has deteriorated to a surfeit of routine Gradgrindery, plagued by constant ‘monitoring’.
That’s not ‘having it too easy’!!
What are you going to do about it then RickH?
What I can – without deluding myself. Starting with what I’ve already noted – just treating my grandchildren, family and friends normally – i.e. ignoring sociopathic distancing.
You seemed to have had a bad day yesterday?
No – no more than every day is a bad day in this shit-show.
Oh OK. People are coping in their own way, I just think that people may need a lift sometimes, something positive and empowering to focus on.
But as I say, each to their own way.
Good point , well made. I think many millennial parents (including my own children) have been co-opted into the safety cult…. I was not aware enough of the creeping elfinsafety culture when I was a young parent, so have inadvertently contributed over the years.
Yes, Barbara. Undoubtedly there are certain real dangers that we didn’t have – traffic being the most obvious. But the precautionary principle now rules lives, rather than being a sensible part of assessing danger.
… and that has definite consequences. Look at all the advertisments for antiseptics etc.; then look at the consequences in terms of immune deficiency and allergies.
Mmmm … somebody seems to think continual child abuse and antipathy to kids is ‘having it easy’
Interesting.
So, add ‘Systematic Child Abuse’ to the list of crimes already committed by the International Police State.
That charge sheet is growing mighty long.
Children get their behavioural clues from their parents and other adults in their families. So the mental health problems being experienced are a direct reflection of the hysteria generated by these adults, in response to the incessant, ‘we’re all doomed’ Government propaganda. Another charge to be laid against the commie bitch Michie and her team of psychopaths
So are we meant to think of the Government Behavioural Insights Team as a good thing or a bad thing? Have they done what was requested?
We can only pray that these children are sufficiently resilient to get over this without it blighting the rest of their lives.
One of the intentions behind all this Totalitarianism was to deliberately cripple our children. This report will be music to the ears of the globalists.
A generation of fearful, compliant youngsters will make for a perfect slave class.
Evil beyond comprehension.
Instigated by compliant adults
We live outside a secondary school and I was watching their behaviour closely as they congregated waiting to be let in through the gate this morning. 98% appeared happy and normal. Joking. Playing. No masks. No social distancing. Two unhappy kids were standing alone wearing masks and extremely agitated, pacing about with backs to the others. Very self conscious. Not part of any group. It struck me again that masks are extremely divisive. At least the kids are rejecting them. Confirms how most humans like to be part of a majority / don’t want to be the odd one out. Maybe the kids can help get us out of this mess.
I’m hopeful that children have the capacity to recover – but there are so many ignorant parents who are pushing their kids into trauma because they themselves are mentally disabled by fear. Hypochondriac teachers are another problem.
I will never forget – fortunately very early on in the scam – when we first persuaded a ‘fuck stupid rules’ visit from our grandchildren. At first meeting they flinched because of all the sociopathic nonsense that surrounded them. But they did shuck it off very quickly, and we were back to normal hugs etc.
But imagine if that nonsense had been continually reinforced for 15 months by a neurotic parent.
I suspect that a neurotic parent would just find something else to be neurotic about to upset their children.
Well I’ve refused testing for my kids (one of only two sets of parents in the year can you believe it) and also stated a mask exemption for my oldest so that she has the flexibility to not wear one, or wear one if she wants to fit it. Thankfully her class ditched the masks anyway and outright laugh at the more neurotic teachers, of whom there are quite a few. On vaccinating children, a relative who was a doctor and remains in close touch with someone in very high level A&E management in the NHS has told me that there is no case for kids to be vaccinated.
What I can’t understand is the teaching unions’ obsession with it all, is it really as simple as a self-interested attempt to stop coming to work?
Anybody with half a brain and an intact set of morals can work out that children shouldn’t be ‘vaccinated’ against SARS-COV-2.
“…is it really as simple as a self-interested attempt to stop coming to work?”
No – I don’t think it’s that. There is something very weird about the leadership of the teaching unions at present – and they are not representing the views of all teachers.
I have discussed this with another of the old fart generation who also worked in education at different levels and – admittedly many moons ago – was actively involved in union work.
We share the same perspective at being disgusted at current attitudes within the leadership – both of the union and of school leadership in general (noting also the exceptions).
But, of course, this is happening within an overall framework of manufactured mythology and lies – a far cry from the diversity of another time.
And I don’t suppose Hancock, Give, or Johnson have lost any sleep over this. They give humanity a bad name.
This video is worth watching. Bill Whittle talks about fear and how we deal with it, in the context of why older people are generally less fearful of CV19 despite being more susceptible.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DO5rBNB_vx8
“Coerced Cowardice.”
Published on Jun 21, 2021
The less likely you are to die of COVID-19, the more likely you are to be afraid of it. In this episode of the Firewall, Bill Whittle explains the source of this historically-bizarre fear ratio. “