Mumbai: A new report reveals that the FBI, which had compelling evidence suggesting that COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, was excluded from an important briefing with President Biden. Despite being the only U.S. intelligence agency to conclude that a lab leak was the most probable cause, the FBI was reportedly left out of the National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) August 2021 briefing on the virus’s origins.
Jason Bannan, a former senior scientist at the FBI, expressed his shock over the agency’s exclusion, especially given the FBI’s confidence in its assessment. Bannan had worked alongside the FBI to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and was surprised that their findings were not shared with the president.
According to the NY Post, Dr. Jason Bannan, a microbiologist, and former senior FBI scientist, was among those excluded from the briefing, which was part of the NIC’s review involving four intelligence agencies. The NIC report concluded with “low confidence” that the virus likely originated from animal transmission, rather than being genetically engineered. At the time, the prevailing theory suggested that the virus spread from a bat at a Wuhan wet market, where the outbreak first emerged in 2019.
In the aftermath of the pandemic’s onset in Wuhan, China, three scientists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien—began investigating the virus’s origins. Despite significant support for the natural origin theory, these DIA scientists found several clues indicating a possible lab leak.
Sources claim that key scientists with subject-matter expertise were silenced during this investigation, with whistleblower Lt. Col. Joseph Murphy alleging that federal grant documents outlining a “blueprint” for engineering viruses like SARS-CoV-2 were improperly classified.
Additionally, the Post reported that a Chinese military researcher applied for a vaccine patent just weeks after the virus was sequenced. A researcher from the Wuhan Institute of Virology had also collaborated with U.S. scientists on techniques to construct viruses without leaving evidence. Despite these findings, the scientists’ evidence was largely disregarded, and they were prohibited from sharing it with Congress or the FBI.
Bannan has since criticized the lack of transparency in how the investigation was handled. In his first interview with WSJ, he shared his astonishment that the FBI, the agency with the strongest conclusion regarding the lab leak theory, was not invited to the briefing. “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 said. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
A spokesperson for the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) responded by stating that all perspectives from the intelligence community were adequately represented in the briefing. They also explained that it is not typical for individual agencies to be invited to such events and assured that the NIC’s work on the origins of COVID-19 complied with analytic standards, including objectivity.
Bannan emphasized the need for a reassessment of the evidence that was left out of the intelligence community’s review, stating, “What ended up on the intelligence community’s cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined.” An FBI spokesperson confirmed that the agency has consistently believed that COVID-19’s origin was most likely linked to a lab incident in Wuhan. The FBI’s investigation has included over 200 interviews with more than 80 individuals since the beginning of the pandemic.
