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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowFBI director Christopher A. Wray said Tuesday that COVID-19 “most likely” originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China, his first public comments on the agency’s position on the origins of the coronavirus. They come as Republican leaders have reignited probes into the possible source of the pandemic, with GOP House leaders holding a roundtable Tuesday to review the government’s response and scheduling a hearing for next week to delve into the virus’s origins.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said Tuesday in an interview with Fox News. “The Chinese government, seems to me, has been doing its best to try and thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, and that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
Wray’s statement follows a Department of Energy analysis for a new government-wide intelligence assessment, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that a lab accident in Wuhan was most likely responsible for the deadly pandemic.
Energy Department officials, who said they had “low confidence” in the new conclusion after changing their previous stance, maintain that there is still no definite conclusion on the virus’s origins, and that the virus wasn’t developed as a bioweapon. Among the nine entities investigating the pandemic’s origin, most still favor the theory that the virus naturally spread from animals to humans, with, as The Post reported, only the FBI concluding that the cause of the pandemic was a lab accident, a view that the agency held with “moderate” confidence.
But the Energy Department’s report galvanized congressional Republicans, many of whom have vowed to install greater oversight on the issue and argued that Chinese officials may have covered up the incident.
Tuesday’s roundtable kicked off a lengthy series of meetings and hearings led by House Republicans, aiming to probe the virus’s origins and decisions by U.S. leaders, with another hearing next week.
“At the end of this process, our goal is to produce a product, hopefully bipartisan, based on knowledge and lessons learned,” said Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), the panel’s chair.
The panel invited three professors—Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Johns Hopkins’ Marty Makary—who joined the GOP in largely criticizing the government’s actions, such as the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.
Several lawmakers and witnesses also broached the topic of the lab-leak theory, suggesting that it had been wrongly dismissed as a conspiracy.
“It’s a no-brainer that it came from the lab,” Makary said, suggesting that Chinese leaders and other scientists had been involved in a coverup.
Democrats during the roundtable said that “mistakes” transcended political parties.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., reflected on his struggles as mayor of Long Beach, Calif., in 2020 “trying to get tests, trying to get support from the Trump administration.”
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With all the “conspiracies” coming true, aren’t the media tired of just parroting political misdirection?
Not sure why so many people are still invested in the idea that this originated from bats – and whose closest variant to C-19 is found 1,000 miles away from Wuhan – rather than the in-your-face obvious explanation that a lab with shoddy controls let it escape. China screwed up big time, lied, and is not our friend, so why try to soft-pedal what really happened here?
Maybe the legacy national news media should concentrate
on true objective investigative journalism instead
of being a sock puppet for the Dems and their allies.
100% spot on….
Center-left person here (Dem, former Dem? I don’t know anymore). I’ve been shocked all along that people are so dumb to believe the narrative that this occurred naturally. Oh yeah, it just so happened in this big big world in a big big country like China, that this virus jumped from an animal to a human in a market A FEW MILES AWAY from one of the only labs in the world supposedly authorized to handle viruses like this. I also don’t buy that this is something released on purpose. It was highly likely incompetence. Advance of knowledge be damned, we shouldn’t be researching deadly viruses in labs where the research staff leave out into urban areas every night. At least incompetent places like China shouldn’t be doing the research (with our support, no less!). This was clear and obvious since March 2020 and I’m baffled it isn’t obvious to more people. I don’t need investigations, all I need is Occam’s Razor to explain it all.
Very well put. Agree completely. And while I understand the agitation among the conspiracy theorists who believe this was deliberate, let’s not forget that, at least in February and early March, the political class that was most encouraging people to go out and enjoy Chinese New Year and that restricting flights from China was racist was the same party that, by late March, was encouraging stringent lockdowns. It was incompetence from the start. But opportunists never let a good tragedy go to waste.
“FBI director Christopher A. Wray” keeps the Federal Government propaganda alive and well!
Event 201 held months prior to the “pandemic” should be an indication that this was not a surprise!
https://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/our-work/exercises/event201/