The FBI found evidence suggesting that COVID-19 was caused by a lab leak but were not allowed to brief the president, it has been claimed. The Telegraph has more.
Jason Bannan, a doctor of microbiology and former senior scientist at the FBI, has dedicated more than a year of his life to discovering the origins of Covid.
But despite being the only U.S. national intelligence agency to conclude that a lab leak was likely, the FBI and Mr. Bannan were snubbed from a National Intelligence Council briefing with Joe Biden, it has been claimed.
Mr. Biden had ordered an urgent investigation in May 2021 by U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories to identify whether the virus had been transferred from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese laboratory.
One of the most popular theories at the time was that it had been transferred from a bat at a “wet market” in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in 2019.
The National Intelligence Council (NIC), a body of senior intelligence officers that organised the review, had concluded with “low confidence” that COVID-19 had been transmitted from an animal to a human, along with four intelligence agencies.
This was then presented by Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and two of her senior analysts, to President Biden and his top aides in August 2021.
The FBI had not only concluded a lab leak was likely but that it had “moderate confidence” in its assessment – more than any other agency – and had expected to make this case to the White House but no officials from the agency were invited to do so.
In his first interview, Mr. Bannan told the Wall Street Journal: “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.
“I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
A spokeswoman for the DNI’s office told the newspaper that the differing views among the intelligence community had been fairly represented and it wasn’t standard practice to invite representatives from individual agencies to briefings for the President.
The office of the DNI and the NIC’s work on COVID-19 origins “complied with all of the intelligence community’s analytic standards, including objectivity”, the spokeswoman said.
Mr. Bannan, who joined the FBI as part of the agency’s efforts to bolster its expertise in germ weapons, toxins and biological warfare post 9/11, has since retired, but is calling for the evidence backing a lab leak theory to be reassessed.
“What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” he said.
The conclusion from the U.S. review published in August 2021 was that it would be hard to confirm the origin without cooperation from China.
China’s only cooperation has so far been a joint report with the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2021 which said the virus most likely moved from bats to humans via another animal.
However, other U.S. officials also suspected that Covid may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology where scientists that had genetically engineered coronaviruses worked, according to declassified U.S. government documents.
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