Intelligence undermining the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic began naturally at a wet market has been buried for years despite a 2023 law requiring declassification, according to two new reports.
The U.S. government has for years concealed evidence that complicates the story of the pandemic’s origin favored by some prominent members of the scientific community — that it began with an animal the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market — according to two reports revealed for the first time in recent days.
A December 2022 report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees first reported on Tuesday by the Washington Free Beacon suggests the outbreak may have started earlier than the December 2019 outbreak at a wet market that some virologists argue served as the pandemic’s epicenter.
Seven service members who attended the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019 exhibited COVID-like signs or symptoms from the time period stretching from the opening of the games around Oct. 18, 2019, through Jan. 21, 2020 — the day before the first official U.S. COVID-19 case.
Blood tests seeking evidence the service members were infected with COVID-19 rather than another respiratory virus could not be taken because tests were not yet available. The report also cautions that there was no “statistically significant difference” in COVID-19 cases at facilities where the athletes were stationed compared to other bases.
A second June 2020 report revealed Monday shows that scientists with the Defense Intelligence Agency had assessed that the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes of COVID-19, bore signs of engineering and that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had the ability to conduct just such experiments, according to documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request by U.S. Right to Know.
The report states that the virus could have been engineered using a technique called Golden Gate Assembly with tools used by virologists to splice genes and assemble genomes called Type II restriction enzymes.
A 2022 scientific preprint advancing the same point was dismissed by prominent virologists who have published influential papers dismissing the lab origin theory and advancing the wet market theory.
Namely, Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen, who has coauthored high impact papers on the wet market hypothesis and who briefed State Department analysts that the virus was likely natural, dismissed the preprint as “so deeply flawed that it wouldn’t pass kindergarten molecular biology.”
Andersen privately discussed the COVID origins question with former White House medical advisor Anthony Fauci as early as January 2020 and began drafting an influential paper soon after stating that any lab origin would be implausible. The paper argued a virologist would be unlikely to manipulate a novel backbone virus that has not been published in the scientific literature.
“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the paper reads.
The newly revealed DIA presentation challenges the premise of Andersen’s report, stating that the absence of backbone virus for SARS-CoV-2 in the scientific literature “only indicates that it has not been published, not that it does not exist.”
Andersen did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 was passed unanimously and requires that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassify all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of COVID-19 “with redactions only as necessary to protect sources and methods.”
Yet the unclassified report produced by ODNI — released to the public in June 2023 — did not include any information about the DIA report. It stated only vaguely that most intelligence agencies assess the genome to be natural.
“Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered,” it states. “Most agencies assess that SARS CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination.”
The ODNI has never clarified why it made the premature assertion in April 2020 that the virus was not engineered.
Documents obtained in a separate FOIA by independent reporter Jimmy Tobias Tuesday involve the Department of Energy’s assessment with low confidence that the pandemic began with a lab accident, but the documents are almost entirely redacted.
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