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Tipsheet

Wall Street Journal Outlines How the Biden WH Buried COVID Origins Info They Didn't Like

AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File

This article was published a couple of days after Christmas, but it’s nothing you haven’t heard about COVID: the Biden administration opted to bury portions they didn’t like. Namely, this virus emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where irresponsible gain of function research was being conducted and its containment protocols were inadequate. That’s not what the Biden crew wanted to hear, opting to give more credence to the zoonotic or animal-to-human transmission theory. We know that’s not true. For all their faults, and there are many, the FBI, of all agencies, has emerged as the lone soldier in the lab leak theory. 

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The Wall Street Journal spoke to numerous scientists who supported the lab leak theory, some of which had their investigation and accompanying research shut down after being told they were “off the reservation.” It was an insight into the realm of ‘spy-world’ scientists and all the politics and maneuvering that comes with it, despite this field supposedly operating on an unbiased and objective plane. One of the most laughable aspects is the Biden White House’s belief that China would cooperate in any meaningful form in this investigation, which led to frustration and finally signing off on the May 2021 intelligence review into the pandemic, known as the “90-day sprint”  (via WSJ): 

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A car and driver had been readied to whisk Jason Bannan from FBI headquarters early one morning in August 2021 to brief the White House on a novel virus that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and had stopped the world in its tracks.  

Bannan had been told by his superiors to be on hand in case the Federal Bureau of Investigation was asked to join a top intelligence community briefing for the president. But the White House summons never came.   

[…] 

At the time, the FBI was the only agency that concluded a lab leak was likely, a judgment it had rendered with “moderate confidence.” But neither Bannan nor any other FBI officials were at the briefing to make their case first hand to the president.   

“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 recalled in his first on-the-record interview on the subject. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.” 

[…] 

“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council’s work on Covid-19 origins complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity,” the spokeswoman said.

But an investigation by The Wall Street Journal shows that the disagreements among intelligence experts over what should be included in the report ran deeper than is publicly known. Nor were the FBI scientists the only ones who believed that the intelligence directorate’s review didn’t tell the whole story.  

Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific study that concluded that Covid-19 was manipulated in a laboratory in a risky research effort. But that analysis was at odds with the assessment of their parent agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and wasn’t incorporated in the report presented to Biden.  

[…] 

In February 2020, more than two dozen scientists published a statement in the medical journal Lancet, calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory that would jeopardize global cooperation in the struggle against the virus. One of the authors was Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that has worked extensively on coronavirus research with the Wuhan institute.  

That statement was followed a month later by a March 2020 paper on the “proximal origins” of Covid-19, in which Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute and four other scientists argued that the virus wasn’t “purposefully manipulated” in the laboratory and had almost certainly had natural origins.  

[…] 

The FBI was already supporting the lab theory, but Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who had served as a consultant to WHO, advocated for taking the zoonotic theory seriously. She said that the WHO report shouldn’t be completely discounted, according to participants.  

Keen, who had a Ph.D. in infectious disease modeling from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, left the State Department shortly after the 90-day sprint to become the director for Global Health Security for the National Intelligence Council. The council was given a central role in organizing the report under the supervision of James Murphy, the national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction.  

[…]

The National Center for Medical Intelligence looks at health threats around the world that might endanger U.S. troops, such as infectious diseases and biological weapons. 

Three scientists there—John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien—conducted a genomic analysis that concluded that the virus had been manipulated in a laboratory. Specifically they concluded that a segment of the “spike protein” that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells was constructed using techniques developed in the Wuhan lab that were described in a 2008 Chinese scientific paper. That was an indication, they argued, that the Chinese scientists were conducting “gain of function” research to see if the virus could infect humans.  

Hardham was a Ph.D. and Navy reserve captain, while Cutlip, a longtime DIA scientist, had a doctorate in biomedical engineering and had served on a White House task force on the virus during the Trump administration. Chretien, a U.S. Navy doctor, had worked on biodefense for the White House and had been in charge of the pandemic warning team for the center.  

They briefed their counterparts, including one of Bannan’s partners, an FBI agent with a Ph.D., on their initial findings. But in July 2021 they were instructed by a superior at the medical intelligence center not to continue sharing their work with the FBI, which they were told was “off the reservation”…

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You get the point here, right? It goes beyond the politics of it all: is there anything Joe Biden hasn’t politicized? 

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