FBI Scientist Explains Why American Intelligence Now Favors the Lab Leak Theory (and In Fact Always Did)

The CIA also concluded with "low confidence" that the virus was cooked up in Fauci's Wuhan branch, but that finding was suppressed by Biden, and only revealed when John Ratcliffe became CIA Director.

But at every turn, Vanity Fair attempts to undermine the scoop this FBI scientist has delivered to them.

Here's how Vanity Fair spins this revelation to its readers: Somehow, this is all Trump's fault, doncha know:

As bird flu spreads, and Team Trump begins dismantling America's public health apparatus, a former FBI scientist and investigator speaks out about the evidence that led the bureau to suspect that COVID-19 was sparked by an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

America's public health apparatus has lied to us for five years and hasn't done jack squat to contain any viral outbreak. In fact, it created the biggest one of all time.

It's time to shut it all down.

Despite their efforts to undermine him, the scientist's disclosures badly damage the Fake Consensus of a wet-market "spillover."

Vanity Fair can now report that FBI scientists closely scrutinized the research activities of a group of graduate students and researchers who worked under Shi Zhengli, the lead coronavirus scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). For at least three years prior to the pandemic, those scientists performed risky research on a group of viruses that included one of the closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. The FBI found that Shi's researchers, in their publications, were not candid about the inventory of viruses in their possession and the true breadth of their work, which was conducted in labs with a low biosafety level. The intelligence community also determined that, in the autumn of 2019, three of Shi's researchers fell ill with COVID-like symptoms.

WIV scientists, Bannan says, had "thousands of samples in their lab" that they'd collected from bats in Yunnan Province in southern China. The WIV had been researching them "for years," he says. Among them were viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2. Intelligence agencies still don't have a complete picture of which virus samples were housed at the WIV. But the scientists' "lack of candor" about their inventory, as well as their years of work manipulating coronaviruses to determine the changes necessary to infect humans, added to the circumstantial evidence indicating that the outbreak might have started among the WIV's researchers. Shi Zhengli and a WIV administrator did not respond to requests for comment.

More spin from VF: They want you to continue trusting Saint Anthony Fauci.

Don't believe these FBI Science-Liars!

A moderate-confidence assessment does not equal certainty. Nor does it mean that the FBI is correct. Typically, it means that an intelligence agency has information that is "plausible," with sources that are "proving to be high quality," but it may need more sources to reach a high-confidence assessment, says Shawn Turner, former public affairs director for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under President Obama.

"We were not asked to prove anything," says Bannan. "We were asked to make an assessment," which involves the weighing of evidence. Though he considers a natural origin possible, he says, "To me, there is enough scientific evidence to say it is likely this was a lab incident."

Bannan, a registered Democrat, has a PhD in microbiology, and spent almost 20 years as an FBI scientist. In 2009, he was among the recipients of the FBI Director's Award for outstanding scientific advancement for his work on the anthrax investigation. He says he decided to come forward for several reasons. One was to counter what he described as inaccurate claims espoused by some proponents of the natural-origin theory, their discrediting of government scientists, and the branding of the lab hypothesis as a right-wing conspiracy theory. He also wanted to counter what he described as the bias toward a natural spillover in the government's reviews to date, and the sidelining of scientific evidence supporting a laboratory origin.

...

Shi tracked the origin of the outbreak to horseshoe bats. Her research--some of it funded by the National Institutes of Health through an American nonprofit named EcoHealth Alliance--found some bat viruses that could infect human cells through a protein called the ACE2 receptor.

In March 2020, when Bannan was assigned to assist the FBI team investigating COVID-19's origins, the group confronted an obvious question. How had a bat virus seemingly primed to infect humans arrived in Wuhan in the first place? The bats in question are not believed to be native to Wuhan, and many of the horseshoe bats that Shi studied lived roughly 1,000 miles to the southwest, in Yunnan Province.

...

With COVID-19, however, no infected animal has ever been identified, despite an extensive search. As Bannan puts it, "How and where the SARS-CoV-2 virus became well adapted to humans is the question that compels scientists to examine the laboratory origin."

...

The WIV team hunted far and wide for bat-coronavirus samples, but one source in particular--an abandoned mine shaft in the mountains of Mojiang County in Yunnan Province--stood out to Bannan and the FBI scientists.

In 2012, six miners became gravely ill after shoveling bat guano from the floor of the mine shaft. Their symptoms included cough, fever, and labored breathing. They were treated at the First Affiliated Hospital at the Kunming Medical University in Yunnan's capital, where a medical student chronicled details of the incident in a thesis.

The pulmonologist who consulted on their case was one of China's top SARS experts. Suspecting a viral SARS infection, Dr. Zhong Nanshan learned that the guano came from rufous horseshoe bats, the same species implicated in the 2002 SARS outbreak. Within months, three of the six miners were dead. The WIV tested their blood samples and found four of them positive for SARS antibodies, according to a separate thesis by a graduate student at China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The mine shaft became a hot spot for studying viral emergence, and the WIV collected numerous samples from there, including one it named Ra4991.

Six years later, with SARS-CoV-2 overtaking the world and an army of scientists searching for a progenitor virus, Shi Zhengli and several colleagues published a paper noting that the WIV possessed a viral sample they had named RaTG13, which proved to be 96.2% similar to SARS-CoV-2. That meant RaTG13 was the closest known match at the time to the virus that caused COVID-19.

What Shi failed to mention in her paper was that RaTG13 had been renamed. Its original name was Ra4991--the virus from the abandoned mine shaft where three miners likely contracted a fatal illness.

As internet sleuths connected the dots between RaTG13 and Ra4991, Shi updated her published work, and tried to explain the omission.

posted by Ace at 04:25 PM

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