COVID-19
Intelligence Blob Boxed Out Lab Leak Proponents As It Sold Fading Biden On Natural Origins Theory
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Nick Pope
Federal agencies and scientists suspecting that Covid-19 began with a laboratory leak in China were effectively boxed out of a key presidential briefing and report assessing the possible origins of a pandemic that killed 1.2 million Americans, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The FBI was the only intelligence agency that was moderately confident in the lab leak theory, but the agency was not invited to a key August 2021 briefing with President Joe Biden in which other intelligence officials shared their consensus view that the virus more likely jumped from animals to humans, according to the WSJ. Likewise, three scientists working for the Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) found that Covid-19 was the product of risky research work — contradicting the position of the Defense Intelligence Agency, NCMI’s parent agency — but their findings did not make it into the report Biden received.
Most of the events covered in the WSJ’s reporting occurred during a “90-day sprint” in which federal defense and intelligence agencies worked quickly to assess the origins of Covid-19 in response to a May 2021 order from Biden. The WSJ also reported that Biden began to show clear signs of mental decline as early as the spring of 2021, and that advisers and staff were known to tightly control access to him and the information he consumed.
Jason Bannan, then a senior scientist for the FBI who had focused on the pandemic for more than a year, was prepared to be invited to the White House for the key Biden briefing in August 2021, but to his surprise, he was not summoned, according to the WSJ.
“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 told the WSJ. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told the WSJ that it was not standard procedure for representatives of individual agencies to be invited to presidential briefings and that dissenting opinions about the origins of the pandemic were fairly represented in the final report. The ODNI and the National Intelligence Council “complied with all of the Intelligence Community’s analytic standards, including objectivity” throughout their work on Covid-19, a ODNI spokeswoman told the WSJ.
Moreover, the three NCMI scientists — John Hardham, Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien — analyzed the virus in 2021 and found that the part of its “spike protein” allowing it to penetrate human cells was built with methods developed in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and described in a Chinese research paper published in 2008, according to the WSJ. The scientists believed their findings suggested that Chinese scientists were doing “gain of function” research with the virus to find out if it could infect humans, and they began working with other officials, including Bannan’s partner at the FBI.
However, by July 2021 — about one month before top officials briefed Biden on the intelligence community’s findings — a more senior NCMI official instructed the three scientists to stop sharing their work with the FBI, according to the WSJ. The three scientists were reportedly told that the FBI was “off the reservation” when it came to Covid-19 origins, and some of their proposed edits to the report headed to Biden were not implemented.
The three NCMI scientists also wrote an unclassified paper in May 2020 that contested the natural origins theory, but they were not permitted to distribute it beyond NCMI, according to the WSJ. That assessment eventually leaked three years later and made it into the hands of Republican Ohio Rep. Brad Wenstrup, who led the Congressional subcommittee investigating the pandemic’s origins.
Meanwhile, State Department official and former World Health Organization (WHO) consultant Adrienne Keen was pushing others to not fully discount an early 2021 WHO report conducted with Chinese scientists that found the natural origins theory to be the most likely, according to the WSJ. The U.S. intelligence community generally dismissed the WHO assessment because of their view that Chinese officials and scientists likely constrained the investigation.
Shortly after the “90-day sprint” kicked off, Keen moved to the National Intelligence Council to be its director for global health security, according to the WSJ. The National Intelligence Council held significant sway in organizing the report on the intelligence community’s views about Covid-19 origins.
In the process of putting the report together, the National Intelligence Council worked up a chart showing how Covid-19 compares to past instances of diseases jumping to humans from animals, with examples like Ebola and Nipah, according to the WSJ. The FBI’s experts argued that the comparison was inapt because the other examples on the chart were far less contagious than Covid-19, but National Intelligence Council officials included the chart in the final version of the report anyway.
The FBI’s experts also butted heads with Keen and the National Intelligence Council over the geographic area where the pandemic started, according to the WSJ.
FBI experts argued that Covid-19 cases would be seen in a larger swath of China if the natural origin theory were true given that the species of bat thought to originally host the virus was not indigenous to Wuhan or anywhere close to the city, according to the WSJ. Keen rebutted that the geographic area of Covid-19’s origin was not known, and that the lack of cases in the large and highly-populated area between Wuhan and the bat’s habitat was irrelevant.
The White House and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
COVID-19
Maxime Bernier slams Freedom Convoy leaders’ guilty verdict, calls Canada’s justice system ‘corrupt’
From LifeSiteNews
The leader of the People’s Party of Canada says Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were victims of a ‘political witch hunt.’
The leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) ripped Thursday’s federal court ruling that found Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber guilty of mischief, saying the court siding with the government amounted to a “political witch hunt.”
“It is disheartening to learn that two of the heroes of the Freedom Convoy, @LichTamara and @ChrisBarber1975, have been found guilty of mischief in the longest and one of the costliest trials in Canadian history,” Maxime Bernier wrote Thursday on X.
“This clearly was a political witch hunt.”
Bernier added that in his view the reality is that Canada’s justice system is “corrupt.”
“Trudeau and his ministers who illegally invoked the Emergencies Act and violated basic rights will go unpunished,” he noted.
“Our justice system is corrupt to the bones.”
On Thursday, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey, the federal judge overseeing the mischief trial, delivered her verdict, finding both Lich and Barber guilty of mischief.
Perkins-McVey seemed to agree with the Crown’s case that Lich and Barber’s influence on the Freedom Convoy constituted public mischief but did dismiss the Crown’s Carter Application accusing Lich and Barber of conspiracy outright.
Lich and Barber both faced six charges each, those being charges of mischief, obstruction, intimidation, and counseling others to commit mischief and intimidation. After the court reconvened Thursday afternoon, Lich was acquitted of four of her six charges, with the fifth charge, counseling to commit mischief, being stayed by the judge.
As for Barber, the court found him guilty of mischief as a principal offender and as an aider and abettor. It also found him guilty on the charge of violating a court order.
As for sentencing, the court will reconvene on April 16 at 1:30 p.m. EST, at which time it will say when a date and time for sentencing will be held.
Lich and Barber both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.
The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.
Lich and Barber were arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa for their roles in leading the popular Freedom Convoy protest against COVID mandates. During COVID, Canadians were subjected to vaccine mandates, mask mandates, extensive lockdowns and even the closure of churches.
Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.” During the clear-out, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and many who donated to the cause had their bank accounts frozen.
COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife
From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
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