It’s beginning to look more likely that the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab in China, another federal agency has found.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in determining that the COVID-19 pandemic resulted from a lab leak in China, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.
While other government agencies remain divided in their opinion on the where the virus came from, the DoE’s assessment – even with a “low level of confidence” – is another step towards confirming that COVID-19 sprung from a Chinese lab, and quite possibly the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“The U.S. government has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” then chief White House advisor on COVID-19 Dr. Antony Fauci told Congress in May 2021. Five months later, the National Institute of Health (NIH) confirmed that it had in fact funded such research in Wuhan.
Shortly after the WSJ scoop, the Biden administration went into full spin mode. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan had already been scheduled on Meet the Press to talk about his excellent adventure to Kyiv with the president last week, though the program expanded the discussion to include the lab leak confirmation story.
“There is (sic) a variety of views in the intelligence community. Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure,” Sullivan said, after telling the host he could neither confirm nor deny the news about the DoE’s conclusion.
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Three years ago, the Washington Post lambasted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who was considered as a potential CIA director by the previous administration, for “repeating a ‘fringe-theory‘” (originally written as ‘conspiracy theory’ but slowly walked back as evidence emerged Cotton was probably right.)
They weren’t alone. On the same day, the New York Times slammed Cotton with identical language.
So far, administration surrogates are parroting Sullivan’s line about a debate in the intelligence community, but as the scrambling suggests, the news catches them on their heels.
“For years, the media and government allied to treat anyone raising a lab theory as one of three possibilities: conspiracy theorist or racist or racist conspiracy theorist,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley wrote in the New York Post yesterday. Those efforts, he concludes, amount to a “conspiracy of censorship.”
The news about the DoE finding comes together with the medical journal Lancet finding this month that natural immunity provides protection against the COVID-19 antibodies, and new studies showing that wearing masks offers close to zero protection against the virus’ spread.