In a bombshell statement this week, President Trump noted that he’d seen evidence that the coronavirus afflicting the world originated in the Wuhan bio lab that has come under increasing scrutiny.
“Yes I have. Yes I have,” Trump replied when asked if he’d seen evidence that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab, the Daily Mail reported.
That same paper is now reporting that a leaked intelligence dossier from the “Five Eyes” co-operative intelligence agencies from the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand shows “the nations have evidence the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
That assertion comes in a bullet point summary presented in bold-face type immediately below the article’s headline. Readers need to dig deeper into the paper’s reporting to find that there is disagreement among the intelligence agencies regarding this point.
“The dossier shows some disagreement among the Five Eyes nations over whether the virus originated in the Wuhan lab or wet market,” the Daily Mail admitted, citing the Telegraph newspaper.
Officially, the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement on the origin of the virus on April 30.
“The entire Intelligence Community has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China. The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified,” said the statement from the DNI.
The statement continued: “As we do in all crises, the Community’s experts respond by surging resources and producing critical intelligence on issues vital to U.S. national security. The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
The Daily Telegraph of Sydney, Australia, appears to be the paper carrying the preponderance of details concerning the leaked intelligence dossier. The intelligence report, the paper says, cites “a 2013 study conducted by a team of researchers … who collected a sample of horseshoe bat faeces from a cave in Yunnan province, China, which was later found to contain a virus 96.2 per cent identical to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19.”
This paper, and others supposedly cited by the report detailing the research done on bat coronaviruses, were published publicly in peer-reviewed journals over a period of years and were thus available for researchers interested in the subject from around the world to read and critique. The temptation by media organs, and potentially by intelligence agencies, to suggest these studies were conducted secretly with evil intent, obscures the obvious truth that the conclusions made by the researchers doing the work that bat coronaviruses continued to represent clear and dangerous possibilities for human infection should have been taken as serious warnings years before the current pandemic outbreak. Had public health authorities been more aware of these findings, and acted properly as early as 2015 or 2016 when warning signs were already abundantly available, the current pandemic might have been avoided. This goes for public health authorities in China, as well as in the United States, especially because funding for the research was provided, in part, by U.S. government agencies.
In part, the funding, to the tune of nearly $4 million, came from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Bear this in mind when considering that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is part of the NIH, and NIAID, of course, is headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man largely viewed as the lead authority on Trump administration’s coronavirus task force.
To put this more bluntly, taxpayers paid Fauci and his colleagues and his associated agencies billions of dollars per year to pay attention to dangers to public health and head them off. Work these agencies funded in China provided early warning of the potential of a SARS outbreak. Yet, here we are, suffering from the pandemic and forced into house arrest and economic annihilation at the behest of the same public health authorities that didn’t seem to notice the alarming results coming from China’s labs.
Has there ever been a more spectacular and deadly failure of government bureaucracy than this?
The Five Eyes dossier, if reports of its contents are accurate, could be right: it is possible the virus escaped the lab in Wuhan. Such incidents are rare, but are not impossible. Other experts have wondered if a release of the agent was deliberate.
But the real explosive fact remains: Our so-called experts in government public health agencies should have seen this coming. They paid for the research and the results, as well as the warnings from the researchers conducting the work, and that critical information was available for all to see.
They failed to act, and now the world is paying a high price, and far too many are paying the ultimate price, for this failure.
Graphic: asiandelight/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Dennis Behreandt is a research professional and writer, frequently covering subjects in history, theology, and science and technology. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and is a former managing editor of The New American.
