An analysis by the U.S. Department of Defense’s intelligence agency concluded five years ago that the virus that caused COVID-19 could have been engineered in a Chinese laboratory and later escaped to spawn the pandemic that eventually killed millions of people, recently released documents obtained by U.S. Right to Know show.
The never-before-published analysis by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) points out that the lab in question — the Wuhan Institute of Virology — was highly capable of genetic manipulation, and includes an assessment that the genome of the coronavirus strain that caused COVID-19 is “consistent with the hypothesis” that it was “a lab-engineered virus” that “escaped from containment.”
The analysis by scientists in the DIA, which is charged with collecting and analyzing medical and health intelligence as part of its operations, also concluded that the virus that became known as SARS-CoV-2 could have come from “a bank” of bat coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab that was under the research of senior virologist, Shi Zhengli.
The DIA referred questions about the analysis to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Shi, who also did not respond to interview requests, previously denied in news reports that her lab held the virus strain that caused the pandemic.
The DIA has not publicly recognized the analysis as its official position on the matter. But, unlike other federal assessments that provide few details to back up their findings that COVID-19 likely emerged from a lab, the DIA assessment offers the most detailed U.S. agency scientific analysis made public to date supporting why such a conclusion was drawn.
The DIA analysis appears to be the work of reputable government scientists whose findings, made during the first months of the pandemic, were kept secret while a competing hypothesis that COVID-19 emerged by natural means gained traction and became widely accepted.
“The slides are highly significant because they show that a strong scientific basis supporting a potential lab leak was identified early on,” said Steve Massey, a University of Puerto Rico bioinformatics professor and researcher for DRASTIC, a group of scientists investigating COVID-19 origins.
“Much of that basis has subsequently been fortified by new information, such as the absence of furin cleavage sites in newly sequenced coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2,” he added.
The DIA analysis, which is dated June 25, 2020 — about three and a half months after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic — has not been previously disclosed to the public.
The documents consist of a 46-page slide deck and are labeled with the classification “secret/noforn” — or, not releasable to foreign nationals. Eight pages of the analysis remain classified and were withheld from disclosure.
The analysis was part of a batch of documents — some heavily redacted and one marked “top secret” — recently released to U.S. Right to Know after it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and later sued to get the records.
The DIA analysis does not prove how the pandemic began. Rather, it argues that the virus could have come from a lab, and shows that multiple features in its genome are consistent with genetic manipulation. The analysis also offers a plausible scenario for how the virus could have been made in the lab and then escaped.
Over the past two years, U.S. agencies, including the FBI, the U.S. Department of Energy and the CIA, have publicly acknowledged assessments concluding that COVID-19 could have emerged from a lab, though most intelligence agencies assess that the virus likely occurred naturally by passing from an infected animal to a human.
Neither scenario has been disproved.
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