WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – FBI director Christopher Wray told FOX News last week that the agency believes the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic was a leak from a Chinese lab.
Responding to a question from FOX’s Bret Baier about a U.S. Department of Energy report that says the FBI has a moderate degree of certainty COVID originated in a Chinese lab, Wray said, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
“Let me step back for a second. You know, the FBI has agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologist, etc, who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses like COVID and the concerns that they’re in the wrong hands, some bad guys, a hostile nation state, a terrorist a criminal, the threats that those could pose,” Wray continued.
“So, here you’re talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab that killed millions of Americans, and that’s precisely what that capability was designed for.”
“I should add,” Wray continued, “that our work related to this continues, and there’s not a whole lot of details I can share that aren’t — aren’t classified.”
Wray also noted that the Chinese government was hampering potential investigations into COVID’s origins, saying, “I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
Publicly, the lab leak theory was widely mocked and dismissed ever since Republican U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas floated it in February 2020. The theory has been lambasted in mainstream media as a “conspiracy theory” or as “misinformation,” and those that posted about it on social media faced censorship. It was not until mid-2021 that mainstream media outlets began to acknowledge it as a possibility.
In May 2021, Republican members of the House Intelligence Committee released a report finding “significant circumstantial evidence” that COVID spread from a leak at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Under former director and White House COVID adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) approved funding for EcoHealth to explore gain-of-function (GOF) research, which entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects, on coronaviruses, at several sites, including WIV.
Fauci and his defenders insisted that the work NIAID approved was not gain-of-function research and could not have led to COVID, but in January 2022 the conservative investigators of Project Veritas released documents they obtained showing that, before going to NIAID, EcoHealth previously pitched its funding request to DARPA, which rejected it on the grounds that the project would violate a preexisting moratorium on GOF research and failed to account for its potential risks.
Since then, leaked emails have revealed that top researchers with NIAID, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), London’s Wellcome Trust, and the Netherlands’ Erasmus University Medical Center were aware of the lab-leak possibility as early as February 2020 but feared publicly acknowledging it would impair “science and international harmony.”
New emails obtained by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on Monday show that Fauci commissioned and had final approval on the publication of a scientific paper that sought to disprove the lab leak theory.
Wray’s interview with FOX was aired the day Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, gave testimony to the committee, noting that the lab leak theory was a “no brainer.”