Spy agency leaders “silenced” researchers at the Department of Defense and FBI who uncovered compelling evidence suggesting that COVID-19 likely originated from a Chinese laboratory, according to an exclusive report from The NY Post.

These findings were excluded from an August 2021 report to President Biden regarding the origins of the global pandemic. That report ultimately concluded that the virus behind COVID-19 “was probably not genetically engineered.”

After the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, China, three scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency began investigating its origin—whether SARS-CoV-2 had jumped from bats to humans, or whether it was a man-made virus resulting from a lab accident.

The theory of a “zoonotic origin” gained support from influential public health figures, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, while the possibility of a “lab leak” was frequently dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

However, the researchers’ analysis, which compiled numerous pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak theory, contrasted sharply with a “paucity of evidence supporting the natural origin theory,” a source familiar with their investigation told The NY Post.

The analysis was carried out by John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien, three scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence, which focuses on evaluating potential biological weapons threats and infectious disease risks.

Rather than highlighting these crucial findings, they were largely ignored as Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines prepared her report on the origins of COVID-19, which Biden had ordered in May 2021.

“The scientists who had the subject matter expertise were silenced,” a source explained, noting that Biden and others were “completely unwitting” about the evidence suggesting SARS-CoV-2 most likely leaked from a lab.

The spy agencies also prevented the scientists from sharing their findings with Congress, despite a March 2021 request from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), or from countering a controversial May 2020 paper—prompted by Fauci—that attempted to discredit the lab leak theory.

“That was going to be the basis of an official intelligence product,” another source revealed.

Additionally, they were instructed not to share their findings with the FBI, which was the only U.S. intelligence agency to conclude that a lab leak was the most probable explanation for COVID-19, the sources added.

The three scientists were further told that the FBI had “gone off the reservation” when it became the only agency to assert the lab leak theory, according to earlier reports from an Australian newspaper.

FBI scientist Jason Bannan and his team, who conducted a parallel investigation, were also never invited to the White House briefing, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported that the scientists had been sidelined.

“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan said. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”

In their investigation, Cutlip, Hardham, and Chretien found that a segment of the virus’s “spike protein,” which allows it to enter human cells, resembled techniques outlined in a 2008 Chinese paper published by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

This paper, which described methods later used in WIV’s controversial “gain-of-function” research to increase virus transmissibility, was funded by the U.S. government long before the pandemic.

Dr. Shi Zhengli, the infamous “bat lady” at WIV, and her team of virologists were trained at a U.S. lab in Galveston, Texas, where they learned techniques to assemble a complete coronavirus genome. Sources involved in the probe suggest that this technique could have been used to engineer the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Moreover, Zhou Yusen, a Chinese military researcher affiliated with WIV, applied for a COVID vaccine patent on February 24, 2020, an achievement that would have required at least six months of work, despite the virus not being fully sequenced until the end of January 2020.

“He had to have that sequence well before,” a source remarked, adding that Zhou tragically fell to his death from the roof of WIV in May 2020, a case later investigated by U.S. authorities.

The cover-up allegedly resulted in Haines reporting to Biden that the prevailing view in the intelligence community in 2021 was that COVID-19 likely originated from animals, not a lab.

At the time, at least four intelligence agencies, along with the National Intelligence Council, which Haines supervised, believed zoonotic transmission was the most likely explanation, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Notably, the CIA and two other agencies maintained a neutral stance on the virus’s likely origins.

A spokesperson from the Director of National Intelligence’s office told The Wall Street Journal that it was typical for individual agencies not to attend presidential briefings of that nature. The spokesperson also claimed that the different perspectives were included in the briefing.

“The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council’s work on Covid-19 origins complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity,” the spokeswoman asserted.

Last month, The Post reported on whistleblower documents alleging that federal grant documents describing a “blueprint” for creating viruses like COVID-19 might have been improperly classified.

The whistleblower, Marine Corps Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy, suggested that the Intelligence Community’s inquiry into the pandemic’s origins might have been “flawed.”

The grant proposal, known as Project DEFUSE, was stored in a classified digital portal, inaccessible to the public, even though it had not been officially classified by the government. Some scientists have called this a “smoking gun” supporting the lab leak theory.

The DEFUSE documents outlined plans to develop a coronavirus with characteristics identical to SARS-CoV-2.

Additionally, since the August 2021 briefing, the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees numerous labs and research centers, concluded with “low confidence” that the lab leak theory was most likely.

Bannan believes that the failure to communicate all the available evidence warrants a more thorough investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

“What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined,” Bannan told The Journal.

“The FBI has long assessed that the origin of the COVID pandemic was likely a laboratory incident in Wuhan,” an FBI spokesperson told The Post in response to a request for comment.

“FBI agents and analysts studied intelligence and conducted over 200 interviews of more than 80 people since the beginning of the pandemic.”

{Matzav.com}