As Biden-era spies and health officials continue to stonewall Congress on their COVID-19 origins investigations, we learn that another intelligence agency, the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), made their own assessment in early 2020 and claimed that there was an 80-95% chance that the virus leaked from a lab, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
As far as an intelligence assessment, that's a virtual certainty.
This is not a surprise. The BND confirms that the lax safety protocols and poorly trained staff at Wuhan made an accident while working on extraordinarily dangerous pathogens almost inevitable. BND also confirms that gain-of-function research was taking place at Wuhan, but it's not clear whether that research led directly to the COVID-19 coronavirus and the pandemic.
The BND reports appeared in the German papers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zeit. Why it's coming out now is unknown. What's certain is that EcoHealth Alliance's Peter Daszak's campaign of disinformation, covering for his Chinese benefactors, was hugely successful. Daszak spearheaded the effort to discredit scientists who were investigating the lab leak theory by circulating a letter and asking dozens of prominent scientists and researchers to sign it. It delayed a thorough investigation into the lab leak theory by years.
According to Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, the BND met in Berlin in 2020 to look into the origin of coronavirus in an operation called Project Saaremaa.
It assessed the lab theory as "likely", although it did not have definitive proof.
The BND also found indications that several violations of safety regulations had occurred at the lab.
The assessment was commissioned by the office of Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor at the time, but was never publicly known of until now.
According to the papers, the findings were shared with the CIA in autumn of last year.
In January this year, the CIA said that a "research-related origin" of the pandemic was more likely than a natural origin "based on the available body of reporting" - although it cautioned it had "low confidence" in this determination.
The FBI also has "low confidence" in assessing the lab leak theory as the reason for the pandemic. The problem for all intel agencies is that the Chinese Communists refuse to share crucial, early data that would point definitively to one theory or the other.
The most persuasive evidence for the zoonotic theory of the virus moving from bats eventually to humans is that's the way animal diseases always end up infecting humans. What's missing is an intermediate step: an animal that contracted the virus from a bat and then passed the disease either through direct contact with humans or by being eaten. That's where the Wuhan "wet market" comes into play. The problem is that researchers have yet to find the missing link between bats and humans.
There's never been a lab leak leading to a pandemic, and without ironclad, rock-solid evidence to the contrary, those in the zoonotic camp will continue to believe the zoonotic theory.
The Chinese continue to stonewall and are now saying that they want "scientists" to investigate the origins of COVID-19. Of course, the BND, the CIA, and the FBI all have top-notch scientists working on pandemic origins, so I guess the Chinese beef with the BND conclusion is that they aren't Communist Chinese scientists.
The WHO investigation in 2021 that went to China was a sham from start to finish.
After spending 12 days there, which included a visit to the laboratory, the team concluded the lab-leak theory was "extremely unlikely".
But many have since questioned their findings, with one prominent group of scientists criticising the WHO report for not taking the lab-leak theory seriously enough - it was dismissed in a few pages of a several-hundred-page report.
Supporters of the natural origin hypothesis - which was backed in the WHO report - say Covid-19 emerged in bats and then jumped to humans, most likely through another animal, or "intermediary host".
This hypothesis was widely accepted at the start of the pandemic, but as time has worn on, scientists have not found a virus in either bats or another animal that matches the genetic make-up of Covid-19, leading some to doubt the theory.
The scientists were led around by the nose, seeing what the Chinese government wanted them to see. It was a ridiculous farce, and zoonotic proponents are still trotting it out as "proof" that the virus was natural in origin.
I will remain skeptical until they find the "intermediate" animal infected with COVID who passed the virus on to humans. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but as time goes by and the search for the intermediate animal keeps coming up empty and more evidence of a lab leak piles up, it's becoming clearer that the burden of proof is shifting from the lab-leak camp to the zoonotic camp.
