To quote former NFL superstar Terrell Owens’ catchphrase: “Getcha popcorn ready.” The Biden administration may be gearing up for a brawl with … the Biden administration.
That’s because the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that the U.S. Energy Department “has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak” in Wuhan, China.
The Journal called this a “shift” for the department. Previously, the Energy Department was undecided and noncommittal about the origins of the virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans and upended normal life in most states for nearly two years.
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But, the Journal added, “The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.”
On the other hand, “Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided,” the Journal noted.
The CIA is among the undecided camp.
One of those, who discard the lab leak scenario, is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CDC Director Rochelle Wolensky said in 2021 that a lab leak was “one possibility,” but added that viruses like COVID typically come from animals.
Additionally, Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime COVID-19 point man for both the Trump and Biden administrations, said last November that he was “open” to the lab-leak hypothesis.
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But that came after years of his dismissing that theory and coming back to the animal transmission story. This month, the World Socialist Web Site reported after House Republicans wanted Fauci to testify about the “discredited” lab leak assertions, that the longtime infectious disease expert “assembled an international team of evolutionary virologists to collaborate on the ‘origin’ question.”
The outcome was a finding that COVID was “not a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The Journal added, “U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.”
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