More than five years after the Covid pandemic began, U.S. intelligence reports are dribbling out information on Covid's origins and apparent efforts to conceal same not only by communist China but the U.S. government.
First, a newly-released Department of Defense report, made public this week by the Trump-led Pentagon, shows that the Defense Department never formally investigated the possibility that U.S. service members may have been infected with Covid during the World Military Games in Wuhan, China in the fall of 2019.
Second, an analysis made public this week by the Defense Intelligence Agency's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) shows that the NCMI believed early on in the pandemic that a Wuhan lab leak was plausible despite efforts by Anthony Fauci and his allies to dismiss the possibility.
The newly-published Defense Department report on the Wuhan Military Games was written in 2022 in response to congressional demands that the Pentagon investigate reports that U.S. military athletes got sick with Covid from their participation in competitions in October 2019 in the Chinese city at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak.
The Washington Free Beacon reported on the Defense Department's report on Tuesday.
WorldTribune.com reported on the 2019 World Military Games as a possible Covid super spreader event on Sept. 21, 2021.
Related: Trump to Sky News: Fauci failed to brief him on Wuhan; Security at lab beefed up on Sept. 12, 2019, September 21, 2021
The report states:
It has been a widely unreported aspect of how the virus may have been spread to the world, the so-called Military Games that were held in Wuhan. A month after evidence emerged that the virus leaked from the Wuan lab, the city of Wuhan hosted the Military Games, with more than 9,000 athletes from around the world in attendance. The opening ceremony was held on Oct. 18, 2019.The Defense Department report released this week reveals that the Pentagon had not tested the service members for Covid nor for antibodies, admitting that “DoD has not conducted or opened an investigation into connections between the outbreak of COVID-19 and the 2019 World Military Games.”
Two weeks later, athletes begun returning home to more than 100 countries. Miles Yu, Trump’s former principal China adviser and a former contributing editor of Geostrategy-Direct, said athletes who returned from the Military Games had symptoms now known as coronavirus symptoms but were never tested. “All I know is that people got sick,” Yu said, adding that he believed athletes from France, Germany, and the U.S. became sick. “But getting sick in Wuhan in that particular timeframe of the kind of symptoms that are very similar to what would later known to be coronavirus symptoms, that obviously deserves investigation,” Yu said.
Wei Jinsheng, China’s most famous defector to the United States, said he “learned there was an unusual exercise by the Chinese government during the Military Games. I thought that the Chinese government would take this opportunity to spread the virus during the Military Games as many foreigners would show up there.”
When then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper was asked about the military games in April 2020, he replied, “I’m not aware of what you’re talking about.” Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley also said, “Yeah, I’m not.”
The Defense Department report, put together by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and submitted to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in December 2022, cost only $4,070 to compile — perhaps unsurprising given that the DoD admitted it had not conducted any formal investigation of links between the U.S. service members and the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in Wuhan. The report, including the cover page, is three pages long.
While it was submitted to a House and a Senate committee in late December 2022, the report wasn’t uploaded to be viewed by the public until sometime in late March of this year after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was confirmed to lead the Pentagon.
A Republican-led House Foreign Affairs Committee report was completed more than a year before the DoD finally made its report public. Then-Chairman Michael McCaul said at the time: “Satellite images show a significant uptick in the number of people at hospitals around the WIV with symptoms similar to COVID-19. At the same time, athletes at the Military World Games became sick with symptoms similar to COVID-19. Some of them carried the virus back to their home countries — creating one of the earliest super-spreader events in the world, and explaining how countries who participated in the games had reported cases as early as November 2019.”
The Republican report said its lab leak evidence included “athletes at the Military World Games held in Wuhan in October 2019 who became sick with symptoms similar to COVID-19 both while in Wuhan and also shortly after.”
The DIA NCMI’s analysis — dated June 25, 2020 — concluded that "the molecular biology capabilities of [the Wuhan lab] and genome assessment are consistent with the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-engineered virus.” The NCMI analysis, which took nearly five years to be made public, said the available evidence even early on was consistent with COVID-19 emerging via lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). WIV was led by so-called “bat woman” Shi Zheng-li, with the U.S. medical defense scientists stating SARS-CoV-2 could have been “part of a bank of chimeric viruses in Zhen-Li Shi's lab at WIV that escaped containment."
The DIA unit’s analysis pointing to a Wuhan lab leak was first reported by U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public health research group.
The dozens of pages of slides — titled “SARS-COV-2 Genome Analysis” and dated June 25, 2020 — were only released after FOIA litigation last week.
In the material released, scientists note that there were “a large bank of Bat Coronaviruses” at the Wuhan lab. And the analysis also noted that the Wuhan lab conducted experiments at lower “biosafety level 2” conditions, and said this “would make an accidental release” of an infectious bat coronavirus such as COVID-19 “more likely.” The analysis pointed out that “Chinese labs have had a history of virus escapes from BSL-2 laboratories.”
Scientists who consulted with the U.S. government early in the pandemic in 2020 believed it was possible or even likely that Covid originated from a lab in Wuhan, yet emails indicate Fauci and his team worked to shut that hypothesis down.
The Proximal Origin article was written by five scientists: Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert Garry. Andersen, a Scripps Research professor, wrote to Nature magazine in February 2020 that he and other scientists had been “prompted” to do so by Fauci and others.
The widely cited article published in Nature magazine in March 2020 was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and contended that SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged through “natural selection” and not through a lab leak, casting doubt on the possibility that Covid originated at a Wuhan lab.
The paper states: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” and that “it is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus.”
Multiple scientists who signed onto the letter had received millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, told Just the News: “It has been clear for some time that all informed scientists — without exception — believed by early 2020 that Covid likely started with a lab incident in Wuhan, but that most chose to lie for five years. Over the last two months, it has become clear that U.S., UK, and German intelligence agencies — without exception — also knew by early 2020 that COVID-19 likely started with a lab incident in Wuhan, and also chose to lie for five years.”
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