Republican senators slammed US spy chiefs on Friday for operating “in the shadows” to cover up bombshell evidence of COVID-19 leaking out of a Chinese lab — and renewed calls for a thorough independent investigation of alleged meddling by political appointees into the pandemic’s origins.
“For years, we’ve exposed the federal government’s role — especially the Intelligence Community — in concealing the origins of COVID-19, with the Biden administration complicit every step of the way,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) told The Post.
“For this reason, I recently wrote to the Intelligence Community’s Office of Inspector General, giving these authorities records and additional critical support to launch an investigation into potential integrity breaches in the intelligence community COVID origins assessment process,” he said.
“The US Intelligence Community operates in the shadows, but I will keep demanding sunlight, pushing for transparency and accountability, and fighting for answers for every American lost in this devastating pandemic,” Marshall added.
In the first year of the pandemic, Defense Department and FBI scientists uncovered evidence that the virus causing COVID-19 had likely been engineered and later erupted in Wuhan, China, after a lab accident.
However, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines never presented their findings to President Biden, sources familiar with the compiling of the agency’s August 2021 report told The Post on Thursday.
That evidence included a 2008 scientific study from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) showing Chinese researchers — like the infamous “bat lady” Dr. Shi Zhengli — had optimized viruses for easier transmission to humans and trained up on their techniques while collaborating with a US lab in Texas years before the pandemic.
It also comprised a highly detailed genomic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 as well as proof that the WIV scientists learned how to stitch new viruses together seamlessly, making it difficult to see whether the resulting virus is manufactured or not.
But the trio of scientists at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence who revealed dozens of data points in favor of a so-called “lab leak” were “silenced” by their superiors and told to stop collaborating with the FBI on their parallel COVID origins probes, according to the sources.
Months before the intel report was issued, Sen. Chuck Grassley had demanded Haines turn over information that would have contained much of the scientists’ lab leak findings — but agency higher-ups crushed that effort, the sources added.
“Director Haines’ failure to fully respond to longstanding congressional oversight requests resulted in material information within the intelligence community from being shared with Congress, the American people, and even the President himself,” the Iowa Republican told The Post.
“The individuals who politicized this administration’s COVID origins investigation performed a shameful disservice to the American people,” he added.
Other sources close to the intelligence community’s efforts also pointed the finger at “political appointees” for pushing the theory of natural spillover from animals to humans as the origin of the pandemic — despite what one noted was a “paucity of evidence” in favor of the hypothesis.
Spy bosses further forbade the three scientists from rebutting a since-debunked March 2020 paper on “the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” — prompted by then-National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci — that sought to discredit the lab leak theory.
Additionally, FBI scientist Jason Bannan, whose team was also providing evidence in favor of the lab leak theory, was left out of the White House briefing with Biden, 82, which ultimately informed the commander in chief that SARS-CoV-2 “was probably not genetically engineered.”
“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 told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the scientists getting sidelined.
“I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
Marshall previously obtained whistleblower documents in November that had been left off Haines’ report used to brief Biden on Aug. 24, 2021, which he said revealed the intel community’s probe was deeply “flawed,” prompting him to demand that Intelligence Community Inspector General Thomas Monheim launch an investigation.
“The [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] assessment remains flawed,” the Kansas Republican wrote in a Nov. 14 letter to Monheim, noting that some “conflicted individuals may have censored the laboratory-origin related intelligence.
“[I]f true, this signals an alarming breach of integrity in the investigative process,” he added. “Today I write with urgency to request that your office investigate the federal government’s COVID-19 origin analytical process and results.”
The whistleblower, Marine Corps. Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy, who serves in the military branch’s Warfighting Lab based in Quantico, Va., found in July 2021 that an unclassified grant proposal, known as Project DEFUSE, had been improperly uploaded to a classified portal and, as a result, was left out of the ODNI report a month later.
The proposal, which scientists have said contains a “blueprint” for creating SARS-CoV-2, was submitted by EcoHealth Alliance, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that received more than $1.4 million in National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal grants for research between 2014 and 2021 at the WIV.
The grant funding went toward “genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains,” according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report.
The DEFUSE proposal was never funded, but NIH officials have since acknowledged that the WIV conducted so-called “gain of function” research that made viruses more infectious during that period — and the Wuhan lab was debarred last year from receiving US taxpayers’ money for the next 10 years.
EcoHealth Alliance has also been suspended from receiving federal grants, and a US House committee recommended its president, Dr. Peter Daszak, for prosecution after his organization approved experiments under likely unsafe lab conditions and failed to submit a progress report on its WIV grant for nearly two years.
Daszak had previously tried to “downplay” the involvement of Chinese researchers in the 2018 DEFUSE grant proposal — and former federal officials like ex-Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield suggested on a biosecurity panel in October that even unfunded projects can be tested under other research grants.
At least one of the US-based collaborators on one of the WIV grants that EcoHealth did fund, University of North Carolina researcher Dr. Ralph Baric, also was consulted by ODNI as part of its COVID origins probe, posing a direct conflict of interest, according to Marshall.
NIH officials and EcoHealth reps have repeatedly denied that any of the experiments could have resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in Wuhan more than 800 miles from the closest bats that could have infected humans.
The virus went on to kill more than 1.2 million Americans.
Biden had ordered ODNI to launch an investigation in May 2021 into whether the COVID-19 pandemic began with a laboratory accident or had a natural origin.
The agency released another unclassified report in June 2023 that still maintained: “Almost all IC [intelligence community] agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.”
Reps for the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General did not respond to a request for comment.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/27/us-news/gop-senators-slam-spy-chiefs-operating-in-the-shadows-for-politicized-covid-origins-probe/
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