Evidence is ‘overwhelming’ COVID-19 came from Wuhan lab, ex-spy chief tells Congress
Jerry Dunleavy
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The former director of national intelligence argued the evidence is “overwhelming” that COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan lab as he called upon the CIA and the intelligence community to reach what he dubbed the “only plausible assessment.”
John Ratcliffe, who was the final head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under former President Donald Trump, described himself 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” during a Tuesday hearing before the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
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Ratcliffe testified that the CIA and other spy agencies have enough evidence to get off the fence and to join the FBI and Energy Department in concluding that SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and hinted that the intelligence community was holding back because of the significant ramifications such public conclusions would have for the already-troubled U.S.-China relationship.
FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed earlier this year that the FBI has long believed COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab, and it was revealed the Energy Department now believes with “low confidence” that the coronavirus started at a Wuhan lab. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment in August 2021 stating that four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
Ratcliffe contended that “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense” and that “if our 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.”
The former spy chief added that the more he learned, the more confident he became that COVID-19 originated at the Wuhan lab.
“The intelligence community’s sources for this information are numerous, diverse, and unassailable,” Ratcliffe said, arguing there had been a “demonstrable shift” within the spy agencies toward the lab leak.
He said “more and more analysts” now lean toward the lab leak and predicted that one day, every intelligence agency “will make this same assessment.”
Ratcliffe called it “unjustifiable” that the CIA had not reached a conclusion yet, arguing that “this is a matter of won’t, not can’t.”
The former spy chief stressed that “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” but that “such an assessment would have enormous geopolitical implications that the Biden administration seemingly does not want to face head-on.”
Ratcliffe said the Biden administration has been “reluctant” to confront the China challenge, including allowing a Chinese spy balloon to traverse the continental United States and not responding strongly to Chinese threats against U.S. lawmakers who traveled to Taiwan.
The former GOP Texas congressman also said it didn’t happen often but that “intelligence on China” was “suppressed” from him during his tenure as director of national intelligence, calling that “improper.”
“The challenges that I and other senior Trump administration officials encountered while in office include 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 said.
He also said, “National and electoral politics were also influencing analysis of our intelligence on China.”
The 2021 Intelligence Community Assessment on the 2020 election had a split on China, with the majority view saying China did not deploy influence efforts in the 2020 election and the minority view assessing China did exactly that — to hurt Trump’s reelection chances. Christopher Porter, who was the national intelligence officer for cyber from 2019 until last summer, was the named author of the minority stance, which argued that “China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection.”
Ratcliffe repeatedly pointed to a January 2021 memo by Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman and longtime intelligence official, which said there was a split in how the intelligence community handled Russia versus China.
“The analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the [Trump] administration’s policies,” Zulauf concluded.
Ratcliffe also repeatedly referenced a fact sheet that he had worked with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on, which pointed to Chinese military involvement at the Wuhan lab and the possibility that Wuhan lab workers had fallen ill with COVID-19-like symptoms in the autumn of 2019.
He testified that “the lab results and tests from those patients … would be dispositive” and that “if the answers were exculpatory in nature, that information would be shared by the Chinese government, which it has not.”
Previously released emails include notes from a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call in which at least 11 scientists theorized about the virus’s origin, with many leaning toward the lab leak. Emails indicate Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, worked to shut the hypothesis down.
EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its “bat lady” leader Shi Zhengli. Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in NIH bat coronavirus funding to the Chinese institute.
Ratcliffe said he agreed that Fauci and Collins didn’t want undue attention drawn to the relationships between Western virologists and researchers at the Wuhan lab. He said he never spoke with Fauci during his time as director of national intelligence and that Fauci didn’t tell him about the suspicions that COVID-19 may have come from a lab. He added that some information provided from NIH was “inconsistent” with U.S. intelligence and open-source intelligence.
Kristian Andersen, a Scripps Research professor, previously wrote to Nature magazine in February 2020 that he and other scientists were “prompted” by Fauci, Collins, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and now a chief scientist at the World Health Organization. Anderson was joined in writing the article by virologist Bob Garry and others.
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The widely cited article published in Nature in March 2020, titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” contended that suspicious binding receptors in SARS-CoV-2 likely emerged through “natural selection” and not through a lab leak, casting doubt on the possibility that COVID-19 originated at a Wuhan lab.
Ratcliffe said he believes Daszak, Farrar, and Garry have briefed agencies inside the intelligence community about COVID-19.