Covid lab leak deliberately suppressed by US intelligence official
An intelligence agency official with a background at the WHO was involved in downplaying the lab leak theory during Joe Biden’s 90 day probe into the origins of Covid-19.
An intelligence agency official with a background at the World Health Organisation was involved in downplaying the lab leak theory during Joe Biden’s 90-day probe into the origins of Covid-19.
Senior United States officials and intelligence agency insiders have told a new Sky News documentary that senior officials running the Biden probe pushed the natural origin theory.
And Sky News has also obtained exclusive audio from inside an internal State Department meeting where intelligence agency figures were pushing back against a scientist who insisted Covid-19 was created in a laboratory.
Former Acting Assistant Secretary of State Thomas DiNanno tells “What Really Happened in Wuhan, the Next Chapter” that when his team unearthed explosive evidence that pointed to a laboratory leak during the Trump Administration, the intelligence community ran interference in support of the natural origin narrative.
“Clearly from the get go, even when the Trump administration was still in office, the ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) was pushing out this notion it was a natural phenomenon,” he says in the interview to air on Tuesday at 8pm.
In a conflict of interest, the National Intelligence Council’s Director for Global Health Security, Adrienne Keen, worked as an independent consultant for the WHO from 2016.
The United States withdrew from the WHO during the Trump administration after it promoted Chinese disinformation about Covid-19, insisted the virus wasn’t infectious and advised against travel bans, contrary to scientific evidence.
Former President Donald Trump accused the WHO of acting as a puppet for China.
DiNanno, who worked in the State Department’s Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Bureau, said Adrienne Keen was “an advocate for Zoonosis, she was very involved in discrediting the information that we were trying to present to the Secretary of State (Mike Pompeo).”
“I had found out that apparently she was an outside adviser also to the World Health Organisation, they are a political agency. They’re a UN agency. So it’s just not appropriate to do work for a foreign power. And that would include the United Nations,” he said.
Keen’s LinkedIn profile confirms her work for the World Health Organisation where she was an independent consultant, providing recommendations to improve data collection and analysis from 2016.
Keen and the ODNI declined to comment about whether she had disclosed the conflict of interest in working for the WHO to the ODNI – but the office defended its objectivity.
“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s work on Covid-19 origins complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity,” a spokeswoman told Sky News in a statement.
Sky News has exclusively obtained audio of an internal meeting where Keen objected to an analysis done by scientist Steven Quay who believed the pandemic was caused by a laboratory leak.
Instead, she supported the comments of a natural origin advocate, Ralph Baric, who had a long history working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including on highly-risky gain-of-function research in 2015.
Baric, from the University of North Carolina, had taught virologist Shi Zhengli, who became known as the ‘bat lady’, how to genetically alter a virus without leaving a trace.
In the State Department meeting on January 6th, 2021, Keen says:
“I do have one question just on this framework. I think Ralph pointed out some of the issues with the probabilities you’ve come up with Dr Quay. I share a lot of those concerns,” she said, before asking more technical questions about his Bayesian analysis.
The input of scientists at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence was censored from the 90-day probe into the origins of Covid-19 that President Biden ordered in 2021.
Intelligence agency scientists John Hardham, Robert Greg Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien had 90 per cent of their input into the inquiry deleted.
They had formed the view that Covid-19 was most likely genetically engineered, but their contribution to the ODNI’s investigation into the origin of Covid-19 was blocked. They were silenced.
Sources familiar with the scientists’ interaction with the ODNI said they were stunned when the intelligence study was released and didn’t include their contributions.
They were told the information had been “too technical” to include.
The former director of the ODNI, John Ratcliffe, has said all of the evidence points to a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Listen the people that had the most access to the most intelligence, including myself and secretary Pompeo, are telling you that the most likely origin of COVID-19, of the Wuhan virus was what happened … Was a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So all of the people that had access to the most data, the most intelligence, will all tell you the same thing,” he said.
Sharri Markson is a Sky News host whose documentary What Really Happened in Wuhan: the Next Chapter will air tonight at 8pm on Sky News
