FBI Director Wray:  "Origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.

https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1630718148100882435

March 1, 2023

On Tuesday, FBI director Christopher Wray publicly acknowledged that the Bureau considers an accidental biohazard leak from a laboratory in China to be the likeliest cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. The assessment had been made in August 2021, as part of an intelligence review ordered by President Biden. In an interview that aired on Fox News yesterday, Wray broke his silence on the matter, saying, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” He added, “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”

Wray’s remarks came on the heels of a report in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal which revealed that the US Department of Energy had changed its position on the pandemic’s origins, based on new intelligence. The DoE now takes the view, albeit with “low confidence,” that COVID-19 “most likely arose” from a lab leak. The new assessment was noted in a classified intelligence report that was recently provided to the White House and certain members of Congress. 

This one-two punch of revelations immediately changed the optics, if not the ground-level reality, of the highly politicized and frequently toxic debate over COVID-19’s origins, which I first began reporting on in 2021. To be sure, there is still no clear proof that the virus escaped from a laboratory. But for the first time in at least two years, the possibility of a lab leak is being taken seriously even by many who previously considered it to be a baseless conspiracy theory.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer appeared to acknowledge that the possibility of a so-called lab leak deserves to be taken seriously. “The bottom line is we’ve got to get to the bottom of this,” the Journal quoted Schumer as saying. “The Biden administration is committed to it. They have all kinds of people looking at it, and we’ll wait to see their results.”

As of last night, it was not clear what new intelligence led the Department of Energy to change its assessment. That information, which remains classified, was reportedly shared with other intelligence agencies, which did not alter their assessments.

But the shift by the Department of Energy is notable, as it funds and oversees a network of 17 national laboratories, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which possesses advanced national security capabilities.  Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Trump, says that both the Energy Department and the FBI have a “huge scientific workforce,” making their assessments of a lab origin significant.

It turned out that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had allowed a US scientific research nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance to provide subgrants of federal funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which were used to support risky coronavirus research. (The Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general recently determined that the NIH had failed to appropriately oversee the central grant in question.)

And it emerged that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with a University of North Carolina virologist and the WIV’s top coronavirus researcher, had in March 2018 sought a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As part of their grant application, they proposed to insert a feature known as a furin cleavage site into unidentified SARS-like bat coronaviruses to assess their ability to infect cells. This raised eyebrows given that one of the most notable features of SARS-CoV-2 is its unique furin cleavage site, not found in any other known SARS-like virus.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/covid-19-origins-lab-leak

Richard H. Ebright
@R_H_Ebright
Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology @RutgersU@BiosafetyNow

The nine facts about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that everyone needs to know are as follows:

1) SARS-CoV-2 is related to bat SARS-like coronaviruses from southern China and northern Laos.

2) SARS-CoV-2 entered humans in or near Wuhan in August-November 2019.

3) SARS-CoV-2 entered humans either through a natural accident (just as in the first entry of the original SARS coronavirus into humans, which occurred through natural spillover in rural Guangdong province in 2002)......or through a research accident (just as in the second third, fourth, and fifth entries of the original SARS coronavirus into humans, which occurred through a lab accident in Singapore in 2003, a lab accident in Taipei in 2003, and two separate lab accidents in Beijing in 2004)

4) Wuhan is located 1,000 km from the nearest wild bats with SARS-CoV-2-like coronaviruses.

5) Wuhan has labs that, at the start of the pandemic, conducted the world's largest research program on bat SARS-like coronaviruses, possessed the world's largest collection of bat SARS-like coronaviruses, and possessed the world's only sample of a SARS-CoV-2-like coronavirus.

6) In 2016-2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology constructed a series of novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses that combined the spike gene of one bat SARS-like coronavirus with the rest of the genetic information of another bat SARS-like coronavirus.......and identified viruses that were able to infect and replicate efficiently in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral growth and 4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on cells.

...In other words, in the years before the start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had taken most of the steps needed to convert a natural bat SARS-like coronavirus to a novel human pandemic pathogen having the properties of SARS-CoV-2.

7) In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators proposed to construct an expanded series of novel chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, this time using newly identified spike genes having affinities for human receptors that ranged from very low to very high; and.......proposed to insert furin cleavage sites--a feature that is present in SARS-CoV-2 but not in any of the hundreds of other known SARS-like coronaviruses and that is crucial for the high transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2--into SARS-like coronaviruses.....In other words, just a year before the start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators proposed to take the remaining steps needed to convert a natural bat SARS-like coronavirus to a novel human pandemic pathogen having the properties of SARS-CoV-2

8) In 2016-2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology constructed and characterized SARS-like coronaviruses at biosafety level 2, a level inadequate for work with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and inadequate to contain a virus having the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2.

9) From the start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its collaborators have withheld information, misrepresented facts, and obstructed investigation...even though, if not connected to origin, they most easily could have cleared their names though cooperation.

10) A preponderance of evidence, including both the scientific evidence (facts 1-3) and the documentary evidence (facts 4-9), indicates that SARS-CoV-2 likely entered humans through a laboratory accident.

All statements in all posts are demonstrable facts.

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1639427476911714304?cxt=HHwWgMCzxdWmtcAtA...

Chinese scientists created this Corona virus

The former Director of National Intelligence agrees with the former CDC Director that Dr. Anthony Fauci lied to Congress under oath about funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab:

"Some of Dr. Fauci's testimony is inconsistent with some of the intelligence that we have that remains classified as well as inconsistent with some information that is publicly available."

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1648406822620119041?cxt=HHwWgoDSubDRq...

Quote:


I wonder why some of this info is still classified

Just habit with bureaucrats most likely.