FBI director says China lab leak likely caused COVID pandemic

[Celerity]

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/fbi-director-says-china-lab-leak-likely-caused-covid-pandemic-2023-03-01/

March 1, 2023 3:30 AM GMT+1

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday the agency has assessed that a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," Wray told Fox News. His comments follow a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday that the U.S. Energy Department has assessed with low confidence the pandemic resulted from an unintended lab leak in China.

Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that the pandemic was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided, the Journal reported.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby said on Monday the U.S. government has not reached a definitive conclusion and consensus on the pandemic's origins.

snip

related

Covid Likely Originated From Lab Leak, Energy Department Reportedly Finds—But Biden Aide Says There’s No ‘Definitive Answer’

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2023/02/26/covid-likely-originated-from-lab-leak-energy-department-reportedly-finds-but-biden-aide-says-theres-no-definitive-answer/

snip

KEY FACTS

The Energy Department’s new conclusions are found in an updated classified report from the office of Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, which was recently provided to the White House and some members of Congress, according to the Journal.

The Energy Department, which oversees many U.S. laboratories, came to its conclusion based on new intelligence, but deemed its level of confidence in its judgment as “low,” people who read the report told the Journal.

The FBI also determined in 2021 with “moderate confidence” the virus came from a lab leak, but the agency came to its conclusion for different reasons than the Energy Department, U.S. officials told the Journal.

Other federal agencies disagree: Four agencies have reportedly determined with “low confidence” the virus was transmitted naturally through animals, and two others, including the CIA, remain undecided between the two origin theories.

CRUCIAL QUOTE

“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other, a number of them have said they just don't have enough information to be sure…President Biden has directed, repeatedly, every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources behind getting to the bottom of this question,” Sullivan said on CNN on Sunday when asked about the Journal’s reporting. “But right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question.”

snip

[RockRaven]

1. I don't expect better from the FBI, so at least I am not disappointed...

[JohnSJ]

2. In other words, they have no idea where it originated, but you wouldn't know from the reporting.

and with no details supplied makes it even more ambiguous.

As far as Wray's opinion on this, just based on the FBI's lack of concern leading up to the January 6th insurrection, does not inspire confidence.

[MrsCoffee]

4. Gotta gets things churned up for chump.

FBI seems to excel at that one thing.

[Sympthsical]

17. Where was this skepticism three years ago?

When it was 100% zoonotic, It's Science!, and anyone who asks about it or says otherwise is a bad person who needs to be censored and have their careers threatened?

Weird how skepticism is suddenly en vogue again. Almost as if it's dependent on narratives instead of science . . .

Yeah, I am never letting that censorship streak go or letting people forget they defended it the way they did (and some continue to).

And can I sit back for a moment and appreciate the fact that now conspiracy theories are blooming about why some intelligence assessments are coming around to question and investigate things?

I thought we were against conspiracies. Wait, nope, that's out the window, too.

Why must all things in life, but particularly science, forever be situational?

[MichMan]

20. Thank you

[Alexander Of Assyria]

6. How many assessments from how many agencies now?? Dept. of Energy had one!?

Low confidence assessment, mid or high, that is the question, followed by…how many does one need? Dept of energy nuclear scientists and…viruses?? Wrong department!

It’s like every single American government agency and department is competing for attention on the same issue.

So now there is mass confusion for the masses, the masses have fingers they want to point!!….mission accomplished!

[Celerity]

7. In 2021 the Biden administration asked every single major agency in the American security structure

that has overseas capabilities and/or mandates to do investigations.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

8. And to release their own reports is weird, instead of getting together all the info. and one

report that speaks for all the federal government? Weird….what’s the reason I m thinking for this shotgun approach?

One agency has high confidence, another low confidence and in the end no one really knows…not that it matters much, origin makes no difference to the virus.

Lot of viruses have origins all over the world, including America. The Earth is their home after all.

[JohnSJ]

9. Weird is an understatement

[Celerity]

14. The different agencies disagree, so there's no definitive answer as of now. That's the single report

if you want to call it that. The single report's conclusion as of now is that there is no final certainty.

[Celerity]

15. Oh, btw, no agency has high confidence, all are low confidence (regardless of conclusion) except

for the FBI, which has moderate confidence. And some agencies have said they cannot determine either way as of now.

[hatrack]

10. Let's learn more about Wray's background in virology and epidemiology, shall we?

.

[Blues Heron]

11. Any evidence or just a hunch?

[Emile]

12. So the FBI is working under cover in China and has access to Chinese labs?

This smells to high heaven!

[Johnny2X2X]

13. If Only Trump hadn't gutted our Chinese assets in the CDC

Not saying they could have stopped the leak, just that we might have known a lot more sooner if Trump hadn't gutted that part of the CDC.

[ecstatic]

16. Exactly. I feel the pandemic was 100% trump's fault

I'm confident that covid would not have become a pandemic under any other US president. Covid happened under trmp's "watch" because he ignorantly tossed away the tools that we had to monitor and/ or significantly suppress the proliferation of deadly viruses/bacteria. On top of that, he lied repeatedly and peddled disinformation to his followers, making the situation 10 times worse. I'm so grateful he was voted out in spite of the pass he was given. Over 1 million Americans dead!

[Sympthsical]

18. Let a thousand conspiracy theories bloom

Because apparently they're ok now.

That changed fast, eh?

Seriously, I am so glad they're at least looking and investigating in the open now. Humanity has an interest in knowing what happened. You can't have millions of people die and be all, "We know everything about this even though we've barely looked. It's fine. Why? Shut up, that's why."

This is what results when science is used as a bumper sticker instead of respected as a process.

Science does not give a shit about narratives. Nor should it.

[Celerity]

19. the following are all from 2021, so a lot of it has been out in the open for awhile under Biden:

In Major Shift, NIH Admits Funding Risky Virus Research in Wuhan

A spokesman for Dr. Fauci says he has been “entirely truthful,” but a new letter belatedly acknowledging the National Institutes of Health’s support for virus-enhancing research adds more heat to the ongoing debate over whether a lab leak could have sparked the pandemic.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan

OCTOBER 22, 2021

snip

On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold.

The NIH based these disclosures on a research progress report that EcoHealth Alliance sent to the agency in August, roughly two years after it was supposed to. An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that Dr. Fauci was “entirely truthful in his statements to Congress,” and that he did not have the progress report that detailed the controversial research at the time he testified in July. But EcoHealth Alliance appeared to contradict that claim, and said in a statement: “These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018.”

snip

Early last month, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the NIH, relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s grant research. But there was one document missing, a fifth and final progress report that EcoHealth Alliance had been required to submit at the end of its grant period in 2019.

In its letter Wednesday, NIH included that missing progress report, which was dated August 2021. That report described a “limited experiment,” as the NIH letter phrased it, in which laboratory mice infected with an altered virus became “sicker than those infected with” a naturally occurring one.

snip

from 19 months ago:

Senior Biden officials finding that Covid lab leak theory as credible as natural origins explanation

https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-covid-origins/index.html

Washington
CNN
Published 6:18 PM EDT, Fri July 16, 2021

Senior Biden administration officials overseeing an intelligence review into the origins of the coronavirus now believe the theory that the virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan is at least as credible as the possibility that it emerged naturally in the wild – a dramatic shift from a year ago, when Democrats publicly downplayed the so-called lab leak theory. Still, more than halfway into President Joe Biden’s renewed 90-day push to find answers, the intelligence community remains firmly divided over whether the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab or jumped naturally from animals to humans in the wild, multiple sources familiar with the probe told CNN.

Little new evidence has emerged to move the needle in one direction or another, these people said. But the fact that the lab leak theory is being seriously considered by top Biden officials is noteworthy and comes amid a growing openness to the idea even though most scientists who study coronaviruses and who have investigated the origins of the pandemic say the evidence strongly supports a natural origin.

Current intelligence reinforces the belief that the virus most likely originated naturally, from animal-human contact and was not deliberately engineered, the sources said. But that does not preclude the possibility that the virus was the result of an accidental leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronavirus research was being conducted on bats – although many scientists familiar with the research say such a leak is unlikely.

On Thursday, the director-general of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said it had been “premature” to dismiss the possibility that a lab leak had spawned the pandemic and urged China to provide “direct information on what the situation of these labs was before and at the start of the pandemic.”

from 20 months ago:

Reports that a top Chinese official defected to the U.S. have swept Chinese-language media this week. The alleged reason? Sharing sensitive information about COVID-19 origins.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/rumors-of-us-secretly-harboring-top-china-official-dong-jingwei-swirl

Updated Jun. 17, 2021 7:17PM ET / Published Jun. 17, 2021 3:25PM ET

Chinese-language anti-communist media and Twitter are abuzz this week with rumors that a vice minister of State Security, Dong Jingwei defected in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States with his daughter, Dong Yang.

Dong Jingwei supposedly gave the U.S. information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that changed the stance of the Biden administration concerning the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dong is, or was, a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), also known as the Guoanbu. His publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018. If the stories are true, Dong would be the highest-level defector in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

Dong’s defection was raised by Chinese officials last March at the Sino-American summit in Alaska, according to Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign ministry official before defecting after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In a Wednesday tweet, Han, citing an unnamed source, alleged that China’s foreign minister Wang Yi and Communist Party foreign affairs boss Yang Jiechi demanded that the Americans return Dong, and U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken refused.