Federal agencies and scientists suspecting that Covid-19 began with a laboratory leak in China were effectively boxed out of a key presidential briefing and report assessing the possible origins of a pandemic that killed 1.2 million Americans, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The FBI was the only intelligence agency that was moderately confident in the lab leak theory, but the agency was not invited to a key August 2021 briefing with President Joe Biden in which other intelligence officials shared their consensus view that the virus more likely jumped from animals to humans, according to the WSJ. Likewise, three scientists working for the Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) found that Covid-19 was the product of risky research work — contradicting the position of the Defense Intelligence Agency, NCMI’s parent agency — but their findings did not make it into the report Biden received.
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Most of the events covered in the WSJ’s reporting occurred during a “90-day sprint” in which federal defense and intelligence agencies worked quickly to assess the origins of Covid-19 in response to a May 2021 order from Biden. The WSJ also reported that Biden began to show clear signs of mental decline as early as the spring of 2021, and that advisers and staff were known to tightly control access to him and the information he consumed.
Jason Bannan, then a senior scientist for the FBI who had focused on the pandemic for more than a year, was prepared to be invited to the White House for the key Biden briefing in August 2021, but to his surprise, he was not summoned, according to the WSJ.
“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,” Bannan told the WSJ. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told the WSJ that it was not standard procedure for representatives of individual agencies to be invited to presidential briefings and that dissenting opinions about the origins of the pandemic were fairly represented in the final report. The ODNI and the National Intelligence Council “complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity” throughout their work on Covid-19, a ODNI spokeswoman told the WSJ.
Moreover, the three NCMI scientists — John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien — analyzed the virus in 2021 and found that the part of its “spike protein” allowing it to penetrate human cells was built with methods developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and described in a Chinese research paper published in 2008, according to the WSJ. The scientists believed their findings suggested that Chinese scientists were doing “gain of function” research with the virus to find out if it could infect humans, and they began working with other officials, including Bannan’s partner at the FBI.
However, by July 2021 — about one month before top officials briefed Biden on the intelligence community’s findings — a more senior NCMI official instructed the three scientists to stop sharing their work with the FBI, according to the WSJ. The three scientists were reportedly told that the FBI was “off the reservation” when it came to Covid-19 origins, and some of their proposed edits to the report headed to Biden were not implemented.
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The three NCMI scientists also wrote an unclassified paper in May 2020 that contested the natural origins theory, but they were not permitted to distribute it beyond NCMI, according to the WSJ. That assessment eventually leaked three years later and made it into the hands of Republican Ohio Rep. Brad Wenstrup, who led the Congressional subcommittee investigating the pandemic’s origins.
Meanwhile, State Department official and former World Health Organization (WHO) consultant Adrienne Keen was pushing others to not fully discount an early 2021 WHO report conducted with Chinese scientists that found the natural origins theory to be the most likely, according to the WSJ. The U.S. intelligence community generally dismissed the WHO assessment because of their view that Chinese officials and scientists likely constrained the investigation.
Shortly after the “90-day sprint” kicked off, Keen moved to the National Intelligence Council to be its director for global health security, according to the WSJ. The National Intelligence Council held significant sway in organizing the report on the intelligence community’s views about Covid-19 origins.
In the process of putting the report together, the National Intelligence Council worked up a chart showing how Covid-19 compares to past instances of diseases jumping to humans from animals, with examples like Ebola and Nipah, according to the WSJ. The FBI’s experts argued that the comparison was inapt because the other examples on the chart were far less contagious than Covid-19, but National Intelligence Council officials included the chart in the final version of the report anyway.
The FBI’s experts also butted heads with Keen and the National Intelligence Council over the geographic area where the pandemic started, according to the WSJ.
FBI experts argued that Covid-19 cases would be seen in a larger swath of China if the natural origin theory were true given that the species of bat thought to originally host the virus was not indigenous to Wuhan or anywhere close to the city, according to the WSJ. Keen rebutted that the geographic area of Covid-19’s origin was not known, and that the lack of cases in the large and highly-populated area between Wuhan and the bat’s habitat was irrelevant.
The White House and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
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