Covid-19 origin: Joe Biden’s Wuhan probe censored Pentagon scientists who concluded it was genetically engineered
The US President’s probe into the origins of Covid-19 censored the input of Pentagon scientists who concluded the virus was most likely genetically engineered.
US President Joe Biden’s 90-day probe into the origins of Covid-19 censored the input of intelligence agency scientists who concluded the virus was most likely genetically engineered.
Mr Biden ordered the Intelligence Community in May 2021 to give him an assessment into how the pandemic began after revelations, first published by The Australian, that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hospitalised with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 in the suspected first cluster of the pandemic.
When the report was published it concluded that most intelligence agencies assessed the virus, even if it had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was natural rather than manipulated in a laboratory
The Australian can reveal that this was not the assessments made by the four groups within the intelligence agencies that actually engaged in scientific analysis, who concurred that there was either a highly likely or reasonable chance the virus was genetically engineered.
At least 90 per cent of the work from one of those agencies — the Pentagon’s top intelligence group — was censored in the final report and Defence Department scientists were told to stop working with the FBI on their findings.
Scientists at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence (DIA NCMI) had conducted rigorous research on the genomic sequence of the virus and firmly concluded that it was, most likely, a laboratory construct.
Well-placed sources familiar with the work that unfolded inside the intelligence agency and their interactions with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the 90-day probe spoke to The Australian for this investigation.
Covid-19 origin ‘smoking gun’
Their internal research at the Pentagon-based agency led to a finding that was described internally as a “smoking gun.”
One of the scientists discovered that the size and location of a fragment of Covid-19 resembled the same fragment in Wuhan Institute of Virology research from more than a decade earlier, in 2008. It was the same technique that the WIV had used in grant applications to make chimeric viruses.
“This paper is the smoking gun of everything. When the team reviewed this data, they thought ‘This is created in the lab. It’s a reverse genetics construct,” a source said.
But their input into the 90-day origins probe was censored.
Sources close to the inquiry estimated that about 90 per cent of the DIA NCMI edits were deleted or censored or simply weren’t included.
“They said the information was too technical to include in the ODNI assessment,” a source familiar with the process told The Australian.
“When the scientists saw the final document, they wondered were did all their edits go?”
They had been working with the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit, until the co-operation between the two agencies was blocked, with a director at the Defense Intelligence Agency claiming the FBI was “off the reservation” on the topic of the origins of Covid-19.
The 90-day study also ignored coronavirus gain-of-function research underway in Wuhan and there was a lack of genomic data analysis.
The scientific team inside the DIA thought the 90-day report was scientifically inaccurate, according to sources familiar with the inquiry.
“There was a lot of erroneous information. There was no genomic analysis in the ODNI report, nothing about the rare codons or the poly basic cleavage site and the minimal cassette that is similar to prior work published by WIV scientists. This virus also had no apparent mutational signatures,” a source involved in the inquiry said.
