Did WHO Officials In the Intel Comm Suppress FBI COVID Lab Leak Theory?

Having a consultant from a foreign organization controlling intelligence is a threat to national security.

by Daniel Greenfield | Dec 26, 2024

The COVID era was an Orwellian nightmare in which official narratives ruled and suppressing ‘disinformation’ was seen as the only means to save lives. Dubious claims that even those distributing them did not believe, like the supreme power of surgical masks or the natural origins of the Wuhan Virus, became dominant under the guise of a national and global emergency.

The idea that the Wuhan Virus emerging into a worldwide pandemic was unrelated to the Wuhan biolab working on gain of function research on those same viruses was implausible. It violated Occam’s Razor and yet the intelligence community, among others, took a lead in shutting it down.

Why?

The Wall Street Journal has another report on the cover-up of experts from the FBI and the DIA who argued it was a lab leak.

The FBI was already supporting the lab theory, but Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who had served as a consultant to WHO, advocated for taking the zoonotic theory seriously. She said that the WHO report shouldn’t be completely discounted, according to participants.

Keen, who had a Ph.D. in infectious disease modeling from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, left the State Department shortly after the 90-day sprint to become the director for Global Health Security for the National Intelligence Council. The council was given a central role in organizing the report under the supervision of James Murphy, the national intelligence officer for weapons of mass destruction…

The National Intelligence Council got to define the terms of the debate and the official narrative over the FBI.

The National Intelligence Council had prepared a chart for inclusion in the report that depicted how the Covid-19 pandemic compared with past zoonotic outbreaks in which pathogens had leapt to a human from animals, including Ebola, MERS and Nipah. FBI experts argued that this was a case of apples and oranges, saying these earlier diseases were strikingly different from coronaviruses, which previously had been far less contagious. But the council’s intelligence officers argued the chart illustrated the principle of zoonotic transfer and it was included in the report…

Keen took the view that the geographic origin of the virus wasn’t known and that the absence of cases in southwest China wasn’t relevant. Keen, who is now a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, also argued that the Chinese didn’t have an effective surveillance network to uncover such outbreaks in rural areas, an argument the FBI experts also challenged. That left the two sides far apart on the most fundamental questions of how the virus emerged.

There was also a debate at the DIA that was suppressed.

As the FBI continued to push to ensure the lab theory was taken seriously, there were also debates at the Defense Intelligence Agency, which houses the main U.S. government organization dedicated to medical intelligence. The National Center for Medical Intelligence looks at health threats around the world that might endanger U.S. troops, such as infectious diseases and biological weapons…

They briefed their counterparts, including one of Bannan’s partners, an FBI agent with a Ph.D., on their initial findings. But in July 2021 they were instructed by a superior at the medical intelligence center not to continue sharing their work with the FBI, which they were told was “off the reservation,” according to people familiar with the matter. That order was earlier reported by The Australian.

Hardham, Cutlip and Chretien also wrote an unclassified May 2020 paper that challenged the “proximal origin” assessment. They weren’t allowed to circulate it outside of the medical intelligence center, but it leaked three years later and was entered into the record by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) when he chaired a hearing on the pandemic for a House committee investigating the virus’s origin.

Having a consultant from a foreign organization contaminated by Communist China setting the terms for the intelligence community’s determination is fundamentally backward and a threat to national security.

And, as it turns out, the worst possible way of getting to the truth.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.