Classified Lab Report From 2020 Concluded Lab Leak Theory Was 'Plausible'

The evidence that the coronavirus originally leaked from a lab in Wuhan China continues to grow amid an intelligence-wide investigation into the origins of the pandemic by the Biden administration.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a prestigious U.S. laboratory concluded as far back as May of 2020 that the lab-leak theory was “plausible” and “deserving of further investigation.”

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conducted one of the first studies on the origins of the coronavirus and their conclusions were used by the state department in their early January 2021 paper that summarized what was known about the origin of the virus at that time.

The study was important because it came from a respected national laboratory and differed from the dominant view in spring 2020 that the virus almost certainly was first transmitted to humans via an infected animal, a former official involved in the State Department inquiry said.

The State Department’s findings, which were vetted by U.S. intelligence agencies, were made public in a Jan. 15 fact sheet that listed a series of circumstantial reasons why the Covid-19 outbreak might have originated as a result of a lab accident. They include the assertion that “the U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019” with symptoms that were consistent with Covid-19 or a seasonal flu.

The view of the transmission of the virus via a bat or some other animal infected by bats to humans is still dominant today. Indeed, there’s precious little or no hard evidence of a lab leak while there have been thousands of years of evidence that viruses are passed from some animal to man.

But there’s a growing body of scientific opinion that the lab leak theory was passed over — perhaps for political reasons.

One thing is certain. Those who espoused the lab-leak theory early on and were criticized or ostracized for it have been vindicated for the most part.

One of the most prominent individuals who ran afoul of the conventional wisdom crowd was Senator Tom Cotton, who was condemned for boosting “conspiracy theories” because he wanted more investigation into the notion that the coronavirus may have leaked out of a lab in Wuhan.

NRO:

We’ve also learned more about the U.S. government’s concerns about the Wuhan lab. Last year, journalist Josh Rogin reported on State Department warnings from 2018 about lax safety standards and a shortage of trained personnel at the WIV. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal disclosed an intelligence report stating that three researchers there went to the hospital with coronavirus-like symptoms in November 2019 — one month before the first confirmed case.

Further, the inability to find the host species in nature is a dog that hasn’t barked. It took only four months to find the host for SARS, and nine months for MERS. Yet more than 15 months on, Beijing hasn’t identified the host species for this coronavirus — something for which they’ve surely searched high and low.

There has been very little navel-gazing by the media about this titanic, inexcusable failure to believe important facts because they hated the source. The media’s anti-Trump hysteria interfered with their mission to completely inform the American people and may have led to thousands of deaths in the United States.

And yet, aside from individual columnists in the legacy media, there has been little effort to dissect the reasons for their deadly failure. Each and every media outlet should carry out an in-house assessment and find out how much their anti-Trump biases worked against them in fulfilling their primary responsibility to tell the public the truth — even if it goes against the dominant narrative.

Those espousing the lab-leak theory haven’t been totally vindicated. After all, the origins story for the coronavirus is still shrouded in uncertainty. But at least now there’s a fighting chance for researchers to be able to tell the truth about the origins of the pandemic without fear of being canceled for advocating a “conspiracy theory.”