Biden Admin Suppressed Info From Intel Agencies That Blamed ‘Lab Leak’ For COVID-19 Pandemic

President Joe Biden’s administration suppressed information from U.S. intelligence agencies that indicated a lab leak in communist China was the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report.

Jason Bannan, who has a Ph.D. in microbiology, joined the FBI after the 9/11 attacks to bolster its expertise in matters related to biological weapons, chemical weapons, and more.

The FBI was the only government agency that assessed that a lab leak was the likely source of the pandemic, and had “moderate confidence” in their evaluation. Four other government departments said they believed the pandemic had a zoonotic origin — meaning that it came from animals — but they said they had “low confidence” in their assessment, according to The Wall Street Journal.

When National Intelligence Director Avril Haines briefed Biden in August 2021, three months after Biden ordered a 90-day review to determine where the pandemic came from, the FBI was not asked to attend the meeting.

“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 told The Wall Street Journal. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”

The Wall Street Journal investigation found that officials in the Biden administration sought to keep certain information from becoming public about the lab leak theory, and that the FBI was not the only agency that thought the pandemic originated in a Chinese lab.

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Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who had worked privately for the U.N.’s World Health Organization (WHO), advocated for taking the WHO’s report on the origins of the pandemic seriously. China blocked the WHO from looking at key evidence to determine the origin of the outbreak and concluded that the pandemic had a zoonotic source.

The Trump administration withdrew from the WHO because it promoted disinformation from China about the pandemic, and it failed to hold China accountable for its numerous lies about COVID-19.

Keen left the State Department to become the director for Global Health Security for the National Intelligence Council, which was “given a central role in organizing the report” for Biden on the origins of the pandemic.

Former Acting Assistant Secretary of State Thomas DiNanno, who served during the Trump administration, told Sky News last year that Keen “was very involved in discrediting the information that we were trying to present to the Secretary of State.”

“I had found out that apparently she was an outside advisor also to the World Health Organization, they are a political agency,” he said. “They’re a UN agency. So it’s just not appropriate to do work for a foreign power. And that would include the United Nations.”

FBI experts argued in favor of a thesis by Yu Ping, a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), that the exact coronavirus behind the COVID-19 pandemic was not native to Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, the report said. That specific coronavirus is found in bats located nearly a thousand miles away in Yunnan. The theory states that if the zoonotic origin theory is correct, cases of COVID-19 should have been first detected in the area between Yunnan and Wuhan where hundreds of millions of people live. No cases were detected there and the first cases were reported in Wuhan, not far from the WIV.

Keen strongly pushed back on this theory and claimed that the absence of cases was not relevant, the report said. She claimed that the Chinese did not have the surveillance tools to detect outbreaks in those areas — a claim that the FBI pushed back on.

Sky News noted that Keen did not respond to questions about whether she “disclosed the conflict of interest in working for the WHO to” the U.S. government.

Leading scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, which falls under the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that the coronavirus was genetically altered in a Chinese lab and that the pandemic originated in a lab leak. The center is responsible for analyzing health threats to the U.S. military, including infectious diseases, biological weapons, and more, The Wall Street Journal investigation reported.

WSJ continued:

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,” according to people familiar with the matter. That order was earlier reported by The Australian.

The report from Sky News said that 90% of the information submitted by the National Center for Medical Intelligence for the report was cut out.

Then-DIA director Retired Army Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier did not answer questions from the Journal about whether he knew of the scientists’ conclusions or efforts to censor them.

The DIA Inspector General’s office opened an investigation into the suppression of the scientists’ work.

The Department of Energy joined the FBI last year in assessing that the pandemic came from a Chinese lab.

John Ratcliffe, the former director of the ODNI, says that the pandemic originated from the Wuhan lab.

“Listen the people that had the most access to the most intelligence, including myself and secretary Pompeo, are telling you that the most likely origin of COVID-19, of the Wuhan virus was what happened… Was a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he said. “So all of the people that had access to the most data, the most intelligence, will all tell you the same thing.”