President Biden is now calling for a report on the origins of COVID-19:
President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble” their efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including any possibility the trail might lead to a Chinese laboratory.
After months of minimizing that possibility as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure for China to be more open about the outbreak, aiming to head off GOP complaints the president has not been tough enough as well as to use the opportunity to press China on alleged obstruction.
The story blew up over the weekend after The Wall Street Journal reported that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough to be hospitalized in November 2019.
How did U.S. intelligence find this out? The report, according to the Journal, "was provided by an international partner." An NBC News story said the following:
A Western intelligence official who has seen classified material told NBC News the U.S. has substantial intelligence that has not been made public about actions the Chinese government took — related to the Wuhan lab and other issues — that were designed to obscure the origins of Covid-19 and conceal its early impact.
So where is this talk coming from? Which country is the Journal's "international partner"?
My guess is that it's Israel, because when the lab-leak theory was first floated, in a Washington Times story in January 2020, it was sourced to Israeli intelligence:
The deadly animal-borne coronavirus spreading globally may have originated in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan linked to China’s covert biological weapons program, said an Israeli biological warfare analyst.
Radio Free Asia last week rebroadcast a Wuhan television report from 2015 showing China’s most advanced virus research laboratory, known the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory is the only declared site in China capable of working with deadly viruses.
Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who has studied Chinese biological warfare, said the institute is linked to Beijing’s covert bio-weapons program.
“Certain laboratories in the institute have probably been engaged, in terms of research and development, in Chinese [biological weapons], at least collaterally, yet not as a principal facility of the Chinese BW alignment,” Mr. Shoham told The Washington Times.
Work on biological weapons is conducted as part of dual civilian-military research and is “definitely covert,” he said in an email.
At the time, when The Washington Post asked Shoham about this, he "told The Post he did not want to comment further."
I don't know what the truth is. The lab-leak theory might be plausible -- or it could be that intelligence pointing to a lab leak is being siloed to the media in order to embarrass Biden. Is the intel from Israel? I'm sure Natanyahu is no Biden fan. I'm sure he found Trump much more biddable and would be delighted to have him back in the White House in 2025. So I have suspicions.
Published with permission of No More Mr. Nice Blog
