Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe Tells House Panel That The "Only Explanation" and Only "Plausible Asssessment" for the Origins of the Covid Pandemic is a Lab Leak in Wuhan

But but but wait -- Fauci said this was impossible, and a conspiracy theory, and also racist!

Why are these Evil Racist Words being projected on to my corneas right now?

EXCLUSIVE: Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe says the "only explanation" and "plausible assessment" for the COVID-19 global pandemic is a leak from a Chinese Communist Party-controlled lab, citing U.S. intelligence and "numerous, diverse and unassailable" sources for the information.

Fox News exclusively obtained Ratcliffe's prepared testimony ahead of his appearance before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Ratcliffe, who was confirmed to serve as director of national intelligence in May 2020--during the pandemic--is expected to deliver an unclassified overview of what the intelligence community learned about the origins of COVID-19.

Ratcliffe is also expected to say the Biden administration declaring the assessment would have "enormous geopolitical implications" that they "seemingly" do "not want to face head-on."

"My informed assessment, as a person with as much or more access than anyone to our government's intelligence during the initial year of the virus outbreak and pandemic onset, has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense," Ratcliffe is expected to say.

Ratcliffe will explain that if U.S. intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak theory was placed "side-by-side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a naturally occurring 'spillover; theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long and overwhelming while the 'spillover' side would be nearly empty."

Ratcliffe will point to China's obstruction of investigations into the origins and will say China is "incapable of offering a single shred of exculpatory evidence."

"The intelligence community's sources for the information are numerous, diverse and unassailable," Ratcliffe will say.

Ratcliffe is also expected to detail the "challenges" he and other Trump administration officials encountered, including "legitimate concerns about the closely-held sources of our intelligence and the sensitive methods used to obtain it, as well as illegitimate roadblocks related to professional conflicts of interest and partisan politics."

Ratcliffe will say those roadblocks included "the headwinds created when a lab leak assessment was initially labeled and falsely reported with near unanimity as a "conspiracy theory" by conflicted scientists and mainstream press, while also being censored as "disinformation" by social media giants. Ratcliffe is also expected to explain that "national and electoral politics were also influencing analysis of our intelligence on China" within the intelligence community.

"To this day, the CIA, unquestionably the world's premier spy agency with an unrivaled capacity to acquire information and near limitless resources to do so, has continued to state that it does not have enough information to make any formal assessment," Ratcliffe will say. "To put it bluntly, this is unjustifiable--and a reflection not that the agency can't make an assessment with any confidence, only that it won't."

Ratcliffe will explain that the intelligence community "makes thousands of assessments every year with a fraction of the intelligence -- circumstantial or otherwise -- that it possesses related to COVID origins."

"The real problem is, now three-and-a-half years later, the only plausible assessment the agency could make is that a virus which killed over a million Americans originated in a Chinese Communist Party-controlled lab whose research included work for the Chinese military," Ratcliffe will say. "Such an assessment would have enormous geopolitical implications that the Biden administration seemingly does not want to face head-on."

Douglas Feith also advised Congressmen to look to the clue of the Wuhan researchers who all got sick at the same time in the autumn of 2019:

On January 15, after interagency clearance of the document and consultations the week before with key allies, we released a Fact Sheet on "Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology" and an accompanying Press Statement on "Ensuring a Transparent, Thorough Investigation of COVID-19's Origin." As summarized in the Press Statement, we revealed:

Illnesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV): The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli's public claim that there was "zero infection" among the WIV's staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.

...

The sick lab researchers identified in the January 2021 Fact Sheet remain the best lead yet into who or what may have been Patient Zero. There is no animal anywhere that has been identified as a comparably likely source of the outbreak. (China's former CDC director, George Gao, confirmed as much again last week.) The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has more information about the sick researchers and their circumstances than has been released.

More at John Sexton's leak.

Ratcliffe stated that we could resolve this one way or another with a simple test to check the lab results from the sick Wuhan researchers.

But China will not permit this.

Which is telling in and of itself, of course.

"There has been public reporting about intelligence that those researchers became patients and were hospitalized," he said. He continued, "Without confirming the accuracy of that what I would submit to you is, if that is in fact the case and those hospitalizations took place the lab results and tests from those patients, if submitted for genetic sequencing, would be dispositive of the issue of whether or not those initial patient zeroes worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

"I would submit to you that in China there are not HIPAA considerations that prevent the Chinese government from accessing that. I would submit to you that if this took place they have the answers to that and I would submit to you that if the answers were exculpatory in nature that information would have been shared by the Chinese government which it has not."

Read Sexton for more. I don't want to steal his whole post, but he quotes Josh Rogin about the secret information that Feith and Ratcliffe allude to, but aren't specifying. China apologists claim the sick covid reearchers just had the flu. But Ratcliffe and Feith are alluding to the secret intelligence is that those covid researchers who got sick had the specific symptoms of "loss of smell" and "ground-glass opacities in the lungs." Those are two symptoms of covid but not the flu.

Correction: I earlier claimed that this "ground glass" appearance was actually real and due to "crystalization." CBD says I'm talking out of my ass and no, there is no crystalization, it's just what the lungs look like in an X-ray (I presume the latter). As Chuy can be fooled any number of times, I'm going to defer to CBD. Apologies for the error; I should have looked that up instead of relying on what I thought it meant from reading AllahPundit's Panic Posts.

Some clips from the hearing. Ratcliffe says everyone knew it was a lab-leak from the start, but due to "politics," this knowledge was treated as a "conspiracy theory."

He also says that people like Fauci and Francis Collins lied about covid's origins because they didn't want "unwarranted attention" regarding the links between American researchers and the Wuhan Lab's researchers, as well as the "sources of funding" for those Wuhan researchers.

So he's saying Fauci lied to cover up his own role in creating covid. That part starts at 2:19.

Ratcliffe lays out the case for the lab leak here. He repeats the language I quoted above.

More here, noting that there is no evidence of any natural cause for the virus, no animal found who carried an intermediate stage of the virus, no evidence at all for a "natural spillover."

Ratcliffe says that Fauci never even mentioned to him that there was any chance this came from a lab. He repeats again that Fauci didn't want "unwanted" (or "unwarranted") "attention" being paid to where Wuhan's funding was coming from.

Ratcliffe roasts the media, "social media giants," and most of all the CIA, which continues maintaining it doesn't have enough information to say where covid came from. He quotes a CIA analyst who was reluctant to share his own conclusion that the virus came from a lab, saying, "I don't want our intelligence being used to support those [Trump's] policies."

posted by Ace at 12:10 PM

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