Debate within the intelligence community over the origins of COVID-19 ran much deeper than previously known, particularly within the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
Three scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence, a branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency, conducted a scientific investigation in the summer of 2021, concluding that COVID-19 was likely manipulated in a biolaboratory. But the information was suppressed by the Pentagon and not included in White House briefings on the virus, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal.
The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are still hotly contested almost exactly five years after the start of the pandemic that took the lives of 1.2 million Americans and 7 million people worldwide.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which just published its 520-page final report after two years of investigation, did not find direct evidence that the virus was genetically altered in a lab as opposed to developing naturally within animals and then transitioning into humans.
But the subcommittee did collect testimony from senior Trump and Biden administration public health officials that the lab leak theory of origin for the virus was not a conspiracy theory, as many within both administrations suggested in the early days of the pandemic.