Federal intelligence officers and and scientists who recognized evidence that that Covid-19 leaked out of a lab in China were kept away from President Joe Biden and not allowed to offer their theory, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
In August of 2021, intelligence officers from the various spy agencies were invited to a briefing with Biden. The F.B.I. was the only agency in the intelligence community that was supportive of the lab leak theory. The other agencies advocated the theory that the virus jumped from animals to humans, possibly from the Wuhan Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a nearby live animal and seafood market, where wild animals were sold.
The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Jason Bannan, Ph.D., a microbiologist who had been with the F.B.I. since joining after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
He had been investigating how the Covid-19 virus got out of China in 2019.
“Frustrated by China’s stonewalling, President Biden had ordered an urgent assessment by the U.S. intelligence agencies and national laboratories on whether the virus had leapt from an animal to a human or had escaped from a Chinese lab that had been doing extensive work on coronaviruses,” the WSJ reported.
“The dominant view within the intelligence community was clear when Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, and a couple of her senior analysts, briefed Biden and his top aides on Aug. 24. The National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence officers who reported to Haines and that organized the intelligence review, had concluded with ‘low confidence’ that Covid-19 had emerged when the virus leapt from an animal to a human. So did four intelligence agencies,” the Journal reported.
While the F.B.I held an alternative view, no FBI officials were invited to the briefing with the president.
“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 newspaper in his first-ever interview. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
