The shocking accusations are made just a few days after a watchdog report claimed Wuhan lab scientists were planning to create a virus that resembles COVID-19.
It wasn’t until February 2023 that FBI Director Christopher Wray made public the bureau’s conclusion that COVID-19 “most likely” originated in the notorious lab in Wuhan, China, where the apparent patient zero carried out risky coronavirus gain-of-function experiments.
A recent investigation by Michael Shellenberger’s investigative group Public suggests that the FBI may have been aware of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as early as March 2020.
A Chinese national working as an FBI informant in Wuhan told their handler on the bureau’s Chinese Intelligence Squad that a “person working at the Virology Institute lab in Wuhan, China was infected, left the building, and spread the virus outside the lab in Wuhan,” according to multiple sources who recently spoke with Public.
It’s unclear if this walking biohazard was among the WIV researchers hospitalized in November 2019 before the outbreak “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness,” as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The informant allegedly told the FBI, “It had nothing to do with the wet market or the bat soup story they were going with.”
According to Public’s sources, this information probably made its way around the 25 members of the Chinese Intelligence Squad. Furthermore, given that “the [confidential human source] was from Wuhan, had been vetted, and the person had provided information on three prior occasions that they were able to corroborate as true and reliable,” the squad would have taken it seriously.
According to a second source, the information about the lab leak was considered “good intel.”
The sources who gave Public these insights requested anonymity, stating that they are only now coming forward “due to concerns about abuses of power within the FBI.”
This is not the first posthumous setback in recent memory for the theory of zoonotic origins put forth by Anthony Fauci and those associated with his apparent cover-up.
The Freedom of Information Act requests led to the release of documents by the watchdog group U.S. Right to Know on Thursday. These documents dealt with the contentious 2018 “DEFUSE” grant application that Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, has a genome that, according to USRTK, resembles the research proposal’s descriptions of the pathogens.
According to the watchdog, recently released drafts and notes related to the grant application show researchers, including Professor Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, planned on
selecting for receptor binding domains well-suited to infecting human receptors, finding coronaviruses up to 25% different from SARS, insertion of furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein, and assembly of synthetic viruses in six segments.
Since virologists have not yet discovered the furin cleavage site in other related coronaviruses, it is particularly significant. The existence of furin cleavage sites in nature has even been questioned by a number of scientists.
As previously reported by USRTK, in January 2020, Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology at Scripps Research Institute and a Danish evolutionary biologist, brought up a gain-of-function study that “looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.”
According to reports, Andersen focused the attention of British evolutionary biologist and virologist Edward Holmes on the “furin cleavage site between the S1 and S2 junctions,” which possessed traits typical of genetic engineering.
In response, Holmes said, “F***, this is bad.”
“You have to look very closely at the genome to see features that are potentially engineered,” Andersen wrote in a letter dated January 31, 2020, to Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time. .. I should note that Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, Mike Farzan, and I all believe the genome to be inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory after our discussions earlier today.”
At the White House podium and on cable news, Fauci played down the lab-leak theory. In a statement published in the Lancet on February 19, 2020, Peter Daszak co-signed, mocking theories that the virus may have leaked from the WIV as “conspiracy theories.”