US spy bosses 'silenced' researchers who established COVID-19's Wuhan lab leak theory: Report

The theory that the the COVID-19 virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, has so far been dismissed as a conspiracy theory. (AP Photo)

Spy chiefs allegedly "silenced" researchers in the US Defense Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) who discovered strong evidence that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese lab, The New York Post reported citing sources.

The report adds that the findings were concealed in an August 2021 report to US President Joe Biden on the origins of the global pandemic which concluded that the virus behind COVID “was probably not genetically engineered.”

What were the findings?

Soon after the outbreak was reported in Wuhan, China, three scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien) began a research to figure out where exactly the virus came from — whether SARS-CoV-2 jumped from bats into humans, or whether the virus was man-made and came from a lab accident.

The researchers’ analysis compiled dozens of data points in favor of a lab leak — compared with a “paucity of evidence supporting the natural origin theory,” The Post quoted a source familiar with their investigation as saying. The researchers worked as scientists in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence, which is tasked with examining potential biological weapons threats and dangerous infectious diseases.

Here's what they found:

- As per the report, the COVID virus contained a feature allowing for easier transmission to humans that was constructed in a manner similar to that described in a years-old Chinese study

- A Chinese military researcher applied for a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine just weeks after the virus was first sequenced in 2020. The researcher later died after falling from the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) roof, US investigators said.

- WIV researchers worked with US researchers who trained them to construct viruses without leaving a trace of them being engineered.

Findings suppressed

According to sources who spoke to The New York Post, intelligence officials excluded these findings from the report that was presented to Biden and also barred these researchers from sharing the findings to the FBI or the Congress.

"The scientists who had the subject matter expertise were silenced," The Post quoted the source as saying, adding that Biden and others remained "completely unwitting" about the evidence that SARS-CoV-2 likely leaked out of a lab.

Notably, the FBI was the only US intelligence agency to conclude that the lab leak theory was likely. “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,” said FBI scientist Jason Bannan.

“I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”

A flawed briefing

The report further claims that the report being prepared on COVID origins by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines -- at the directions of Joe Biden -- informed the President that the more dominant view of COVID origins within the intelligence community in 2021 was that the virus had jumped from animals to humans.

“The FBI has long assessed that the origin of the COVID pandemic was likely a laboratory incident in Wuhan,” an FBI spokesperson told The Post when asked for comment.

The revelations have renewed calls for a deeper probe into the origins of the COVID-19 virus that claimed over 1.2 million lives in the United States alone.