China dismisses FBI director's admission that Wuhan lab is 'most likely' origin of COVID-19, hounds Elon Musk over lab-leak claim



FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted during an interview Tuesday that the bureau has long suspected the COVID-19 pandemic to have been the result of a lab incident in Wuhan, China — a possibility the Chinese Communist Party, Dr. Anthony Fauci, members of the media, and so-called experts have spent years downplaying.

CCP apparatchiks lashed out, suggesting that Wray's recognition of Beijing's possible culpability hurt American credibility.

A CCP-run propaganda outfit similarly lashed out at Twitter CEO Elon Musk over his circulation of a report concerning the lab-leak theory, intimating that doing so may have consequences.

These two incidents, which occurred just hours apart, signal Beijing's growing sensitivity amid mounting Western certainty about the CCP's hand in the deaths of tens of millions of people worldwide.

The FBI's delayed admission

In his Tuesday interview with Fox News' Bret Baier, Wray confirmed a suggestion made in a recent Wall Street Journal report: that the FBI had determined with "moderate confidence" in 2021 that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak and maintains this view.

In the same report, the Journal detailed how the Department of Energy has confirmed that it similarly suspects COVID-19 leaked from a communist Chinese lab.

"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 told Baier. "Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab."

\u201cJust in: In case there was any remaining doubt that the US intelligence community is actively promoting the COVID lab leak theory, FBI Director Christopher Wray has now voiced his support for the theory.\nhttps://t.co/W1fdfeje8x\u201d
— Michael P Senger (@Michael P Senger) 1677629637

Extra to its possible responsibility for a global pandemic, FBI Director Wray suggested that the CCP has been hard at work on a cover-up, seeking to undermine international efforts to ascertain the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

"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," said Wray.

TheBlaze previously reported that extra to possible culpability over the potential manufacture and release of the virus (i.e., at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab), Chinese authorities also delayed warning the world about the emergence of the deadly disease, going to great lengths to silence doctors like the late Lie Wenliang, who tried to raise the alarm.

Communist officials waited until Dec. 31 to alert the World Health Organization, then claimed, "The disease is preventable and controllable."

A Five Eyes intelligence dossier accused the CCP in May 2020 of engaging in an "assault on international transparency" to the "endangerment of other countries," reported the New York Post.

The intelligence dossier indicated that the genocidal Chinese regime had scrambled to bury evidence of the virus and its origins, "destroying" lab samples, censoring evidence of spread, and denying sample requests from other countries.

Marty Makary, a professor of public health policy at John Hopkins University, told Congress Tuesday it is a "no-brainer" that a Chinese lab was responsible for the pandemic, reported Newsweek.

"The epicenter of the world [coronavirus pandemic] is five miles from one of the only high-level virology labs in China. The doctors initially were arrested and forced to sign non-disclosure gag documents," said Makary. "The lab reports have been destroyed; they've not been turned over. The sequence reported from the lab to the NIH database were deleted by a request from Chinese scientists that called over early on and said, 'Delete those sequences we put in the database.'"

More denial from Beijing

The Associated Press reported that the Chinese regime's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning claimed Tuesday that "by rehashing the lab-leak theory, the U.S. will not succeed in discrediting China, and instead, it will only hurt its own credibility."

Ning said, "We urge the U.S. to respect science and facts ... stop turning origin tracing into something about politics and intelligence, and stop disrupting social solidarity and origins cooperation."

Despite China having barred entry to members of the World Health Organization team investigating the outbreak in early 2021, destroyed evidence about the outbreak, and silenced whistleblowers, Ning claimed that China has been "open and transparent" in the quest for answers about COVID-19 and has "shared the most data and research results on virus tracing and made important contributions to global virus tracing research."

Wray was not the only target of the CCP's ire over the renewed interest in the lab-leak theory.

Broken pots

The investigative journalist behind the Substack Kanekoa News tweeted a video compilation concerning Fauci's alleged funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Lab and lies about having done so before Congress.

Noting that "now both the FBI & the Department of Energy have concluded that the coronavirus originated at the Wuhan lab," Kanekoa asked, "Does that mean Dr. Anthony Fauci funded the development of COVID-19?"

Elon Musk, who previously suggested that his pronouns were "Prosecute/Fauci," responded, "He did it via a pass-through organization (EcoHealth)."

\u201c@KanekoaTheGreat He did it via a pass-through organization (EcoHealth)\u201d
— kanekoa.substack.com (@kanekoa.substack.com) 1677436709

As a result of Musk's participation in this particular discussion concerning the "likely" Wuhan lab origins of the virus, the Global Times, a CCP propaganda paper, threatened the tech magnate, suggesting he could be "breaking the pot of China."

CNBC's Eunice Yoon noted that this expression is the Chinese equivalent of "biting the hand that feeds you," likely intimating there could be repercussions, given that China is Tesla's second-largest market and the company has considerable assets in the country, including its factory campus in Shanghai.

Yoon indicated that the Global Times also wrote, "Some may think @elonmusk made those remarks only to attack Fauci," but the posts he retweeted "almost all link the origins of #Covid19 to China and the argument is repeatedly used by the US right wing and anti-China media hostile to China to frame #China."

\u201c#China Communist Party paper warns @elonmusk against pushing #COVID19 lab leak theory. @globaltimesnews posts on social media \u201cElon Musk, are you breaking the pot of China?\u201d (\u201cBreaking the pot after eating\u201d is Chinese \u201cbiting the hand that feeds you.\u201d) https://t.co/iWmMZAOiGt\u201d
— Eunice Yoon (@Eunice Yoon) 1677563235

Some in Washington suspect that this international battle for the truth is backgrounded by a far more significant struggle.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) emphasized Tuesday during the first hearing of the House select committee on China, which he chairs, that China cannot be trusted and must be taken deadly seriously: "We may call this a 'strategic competition,' but it's not a polite tennis match. ... This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake."

H.R. McMaster testified before the committee, saying, "You could say that the Chinese Communist Party is the Harry Houdini of Marxist Leninist regimes, the David Copperfield of communism, the Criss Angel of autocracy, but the magic is fading. There's really no excuse any more for being fooled about Beijing's intentions."

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HHS inspector general issues damning report claiming NIH and EcoHealth failed to properly monitor dangerous virus research in China



The National Institutes of Health, directed by Francis Collins until December 2021, has long provided federal funds to the EcoHealth Alliance run by British zoologist Peter Daszak.

EcoHealth has, in turn, used grant money to fund dangerous gain-of-function research — executed in part by foreign entities — on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly the epicenter of the pandemic that has claimed tens of millions of lives worldwide.

According to a damning new report from the HHS Office of Inspector General, the NIH knew about potential risks associated with the research being performed in China that had been executed using federal grant money funneled to and through EHA.

Despite this knowledge, it "did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address EcoHealth's compliance with some requirements."

The Daily Mail reported that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helmed by Anthony Fauci until 2022, was the NIH branch responsible for monitoring this research.

The OIG report further suggested that while procedures were in place to monitor the dangerous work underway and to ensure adherence to requirements, they proved wanting, owing to deficiencies in compliance.

Both the NIH and EcoHealth are said to have flouted federal requirements, directly and/or by extension of their subawards.

For instance, the NIH asked EHA on Nov. 5, 2021, to provide scientific documentation pertaining to experiments performed in Wuhan. The OIG indicated that it did not encounter evidence that EHA ever obtained that information. EHA officials reportedly confirmed the Wuhan lab had proven unresponsive to its request for data.

The NIH also reportedly failed to refer the dangerous research to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for an outside review concerning enhanced potential pandemic pathogens because it determined the research did not involve and was unlikely to set off a pandemic.

Among the other deficiencies the OIG report noted were the NIH's improper termination of a grant and "EcoHealth's improper use of grant funds, resulting in $89,171 in unallowable costs."

These deficiencies "limited NIH and EcoHealth's ability to effectively monitor Federal grant awards and subawards to understand the nature of the research conducted, identify potential problem areas, and take corrective action."

"With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research," the report concluded.

Dr. Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University, told the Daily Mail, "These conclusions demonstrate major failures in past NIH oversight of high-risk research on enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and underscore the need for both accountability for failures in past NIH oversight and strengthening of future NIH oversight."

The EHA issued a statement in response to the report, contending that the NIH, facing "significant political pressure ... retroactively alleged that our work was not in compliance," and that the nonprofit is "fully committed to responsible research with enhanced potential pandemic pathogens and follows all applicable U.S. policy frameworks and rules regarding such research."

Republicans lawmakers have repeatedly highlighted EHA's "lengthy history of reporting failures and collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)," noting that the WIV "is a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) laboratory and the likely origin of the COVID-19 pandemic."

Daszak previously called NIH requests that U.S. federal officials inspect the WIV "heinous," and derided suggestions that the virus might have leaked from the WIV — to which his organization had directed a significant amount of taxpayer funds — as "conspiracy theories."

Despite questions about its compliance and its deficiencies, EcoHealth nevertheless secured funding to the tune of millions of dollars last month from the Department of Defense.

"Despite [EcoHealth] possibly having caused the COVID-19 pandemic, and despite definitely having repeatedly and gravely violated terms of a US-government grant, currently has 12 active US-government grants and contracts, totaling more than $34 million," Dr. Ebright said of EHA's continued funding at taxpayers' expense.

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