US government health officials deliberately downplayed a lab leak as the most likely cause of the Covid pandemic – despite ALL intelligence pointing to Wuhan, a bombshell new doc has revealed.
Former intelligence chief John Ratcliffe and top health department official Dr Robert Kadlec have spoken out about discussions that unfolded behind closed doors at the highest levels of the US government during the pandemic.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been at the centre of the lab leak theory ever since Covid first emerged just a stone's throw from the facility – which was known to be studying very similar bat viruses.
Many scientists and intelligence officials suspect bungling researchers at the lab accidentally spread Covid during risky experiments on bat coronaviruses.
Even the FBI and the US Department of Energy now believe Covid most likely leaked from a lab in China.
And in a new documentary from Sky News Australia's Sharri Markson – What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Next Chapter – top intelligence officials and scientists share new evidence on the origins of Covid.
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Ratcliffe – who served as the Director of National Intelligence from 2020 to 2021 – revealed that what was being said in public was not supported by any available intelligence they had.
He believes a lab leak is "most likely what happened, it's more than just a possibility, it's certainly a probability, and it's probably a certainty".
America’s top doctor Anthony Fauci – who offered Covid briefings alongside the US President – repeatedly said there was no scientific evidence the pandemic was sparked by a lab leak – or was lab-made.
But according to Ratcliffe, this wasn't the case – and Fauci knew that.
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US President Donald Trump did float the lab leak theory in public, but many health experts sought to downplay the suspicions at every turn.
International scientists had claimed the virus emerged in animals – most likely bats or pangolins – before jumping to the human population.
But later, a US Congress subpoena led to the release of hundreds of emails and messages showing some of the scientists were concerned very early on that Covid had come from a lab, with the hallmarks of genetic engineering.
And the messages showed that Fauci had been informed of some of these concerns.
Privately, a lab leak was a real possibility, but publicly, many scientists and government officials were describing it as a "conspiracy".
Instead of sharing scientists' suspicions, Dr Fauci diverted attention away from the lab leak theory.
"I watched what was happening in the public domain and listened to folks like Dr Anthony Fauci," Ratcliffe told Sharri.
"He said the mutations of the virus were totally consistent with a jump from animals to humans.
"What I found was that there wasn't any intelligence that support that, nor any scientific data that we could find.
"The people who had the most access to the most intelligence, including myself and Pompeo, are telling you that the most likely origin of Covid-19 was a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"All the people who have the most access to the most data, the most intelligence, they will all tell you the same thing."
The people who had the most access to the most intelligence… are telling you that the most likely origin of Covid was a lab leak
Speaking for the first time, Dr Robert Kadlec, the former assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Department of Health, admitted the government deliberately downplayed the lab leak theory.
Dr Kadlec, who reported directly to the president and was technically senior to Dr Fauci, said it was downplayed to encourage cooperation from China in the early days of the outbreak.
"We were trying to make sure that, politically, you would not get into a situation where people would make accusations or allegations," he said.
"But quite honestly what happened was the exact opposite."
And Dr Kadlec said Fauci was likely worried about his own reputation.
As journalists and scientists tried to uncover clues on the origins of the pandemic, it soon emerged that Dr Fauci's agency, the National Institute of Health, funded the research at the Wuhan lab.
Dr Kadlec said: "That would be a natural reaction of him or anybody, to think 'what could this do to me or my institution, if we were found to have some culpability or some involvement in this?'
"What probably made that more acute was the fact that they didn't have good visibility into what they were doing and what they were supporting through the grants to Wuhan Institute of Virology.
"That probably magnified that concern."
But Dr Kadlec said he still wakes up in middle of the night "because it's something that we all played a role in".
“We had some successes, we had some other non-successes, meaning failures," he added.
I just feel like it is an obligation that I have to say what happened
"And part of the reason I’m still committed to trying to… bring this subject up is at least to say, it’s important to know now what happened.
"I just feel like it is an obligation that I have to say what happened.
"And I think to factually try to portray this, not to get sympathy or forgiveness, but more to saying factually, here's what happened.
"This is what we tried to do. Did it work? No.
"In fact, the thing you regret is that the downstream effects were things that we could not control."
Dr Kadlec also warned another pandemic could emerge from high-risk experiments in labs across the world – saying lessons have not been learned from Covid.
“The tools of science to do this kind of synthetic biology, this risky research has not been limited to China," he said.
"It happens in the United States. It’s happening in a lot of places in the world and we could have another one of these if we don’t accept that."
Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, said it was "made absolutely sure" the lab leak theory was "not given any oxygen".
Sir Richard – who was head of MI6 between 1999 and 2004 – believes Covid was created by Chinese scientists before it accidentally leaked.
He said it has become clear that only one side of the argument was put forward – the natural origins argument – and any other debate was "actively suppressed".
They put forward one side of the argument, and made absolutely sure the opposite view was not given any oxygen
"What's most significant is to discover a legitimate scientific debate about the origins of Covid was actually actively suppressed around the world," he said on the documentary.
"We've now got pretty clear idea of what meetings took place, what happened.
"They put forward one side of the argument, and made absolutely sure the opposite view was not given any oxygen.
"One has to conclude that they were not allowed to speak up. It's clear where the balance of the evidence lies."
Another US government official, Thomas DiNanno, the former US Assistant Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021, described the silence as "clearly an orchestrated effort to put out a certain narrative, and the narrative took".
DiNanno was among the first to discover that the first known cases of Covid came from coronavirus researchers in the Wuhan lab.
He said: "The date was highly significant and it put sick researchers in the Chinese government – that we now know were on the US government payroll -had fallen ill with Covid-like symptoms in the late fall.
"These were researchers that we knew were doing gain-of-function research."
Gain-of-function research refers to the genetic manipulation of a virus to give it new functions – such as the ability to infect humans or become airborne.
And this is what researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing.
Leaked documents show how the lab asked for funding from the US in 2018 to experiment with genetically modifying bat coronaviruses to make them more infectious.
Covid emerged the following year – with a unique feature that made it a pandemic pathagen and "ready made" to infect humans.
The proposal really provides step by step instructions for how a scientist could create the virus that causes Covid
Many scientists consider the proposal of funding a "blueprint" for Covid.
Dr Justin Kenney, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which is at the forefront of research into the virus that causes Covid, described the proposal as the "smoking gun".
"The Defuse proposal really provides step by step instructions for how a scientist could create the virus that causes Covid-19," he said.
"To me and many other scientists, the proposal was the smoking gun.
"This is not something you would just get from a virology lab working on coronaviruses.
"This is a very specific blueprint for making SARS-CoV-2.
"The fact that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology explicitly proposed constructing viruses that would have all the key hallmarks of SARS-CoV-2 is just a remarkable coincidence – if it fact it is a coincidence."
Dr Kinney believes it's likely that the Wuhan researchers had already started their risky research described in the leaked funding proposal.
"Often, scientists have done a substantial fraction of the research they have proposed," he said.
"Sometimes they have done all the research they proposed.
"If you're a scientist and you think that a certain research programme is worth pursuing, you just do it, you don't wait until you have specific funding."
What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Next Chapter premieres on Sky News Australia on Tuesday at 8pm AEDT
SHARRI MARKSON’S COVID INVESTIGATION
Sharri Markson, author of What Really Happen in Wuhan, has spent the last three years investigating the origins of Covid.
She has exposed new evidence around how governments and scientists hid the truth and uncovering mounting evidence.
In her first documentary, she interviewed former president Donald Trump and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
"Years later government officials would prefer to turn a blind eye than confront the most likely explanation for how the pandemic started," Sharri said.
"We must not roll over. This documentary is about exposing the facts and revealing the uncomfortable truths.
"Once a conspiracy, now a laboratory origin of Covid-19 is a serious hypothesis that leading intelligence agencies and scientists believe started the pandemic.
"More evidence now points to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the outbreak than any other origin."
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