In a matter of weeks, the intelligence community is scheduled to deliver a report to President Joe Biden that will “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” about the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. A new report issued by the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s minority staff sets a high bar.
Texas Republican Michael McCaul’s staff makes a strong case that “the preponderance of the evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019.”
If the intelligence community cannot thoroughly rebut this report, it should be forced to bow to its conclusions.
The narrative outlined in the report is compelling. The Wuhan Institute of Virology came on the United States’s radar in January 2018 after State Department officials visited the lab and were alarmed by the lack of proper personnel and protocol to operate a high-containment laboratory safely. These cables also warned the WIV was working on bat coronaviruses that could ignite a pandemic similar to the 2002 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak, which also originated from a Chinese lab leak.
Fast forward to Sept. 12, 2019, when the WIV’s online database of virus samples suddenly disappeared from the institute’s computers and has not been found since. In the weeks following the data disappearance, searches for “cough” spiked in the Wuhan area on Chinese search engines, and satellite data shows parking lot volume at five hospitals close to the WIV also reached daily highs.
Then on Oct. 18, 2019, athletes from around the world arrived in Wuhan for the Military World Games. A Luxembourg participant described Wuhan as a “ghost town” while there. He found it odd officials took his temperature when he arrived at the airport.
A Canadian athlete reported the city “was in lockdown” — in October 2019. He recounted that he and 60 of his colleagues became sick 12 days after they arrived.
Athletes from Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and France also complained of COVID-like symptoms while in Wuhan. Each of these countries has since documented COVID-19 cases in their country before the outbreak became public in January 2020. In short, the Military World Games in Wuhan appears to have been the world’s first superspreader event.
By February 2020, Chinese nationals with connections to the WIV were reaching out to Western sympathizers, looking for allies in their effort to cover up COVID-19’s true origin. According to emails obtained by Republican staff, EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak became a leading collaborator with the Chinese government, acting as the mastermind behind a letter to the Lancet signed by 27 scientists, condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”
This letter was then used to suppress and silence voices in the U.S. media that suggested the Wuhan institute might have been the source of the virus. In one email, Daszak even thanked National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci for going on television and “publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 … not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Despite the best efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, Dr. Daszak, and Dr. Fauci, the truth about the origins of COVID-19 is finally coming out.
When Biden first took office, he asked the intelligence community to produce a report determining where the virus came from. That report failed to choose which story was more likely — either the Chinese Communist Party’s claim the virus came from an animal that has somehow still not been identified or that a Chinese lab let an airborne virus escape … again.
Let’s hope the intelligence community doesn’t take the easy way out yet again.
