New Docs: Fauci Colluded With Intel Agencies On Covid Cover-Up And Then Lied To Congress About It
'After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability,' said outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard.'After years of lies, censorship, and cover ups, the American people deserve transparency, truth, and accountability,' said outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard.Gain-of-function experiments on hantaviruses? Yes, but virus threat is still MASSIVELY overblown.
The legacy media feverishly concern-mongered about COVID-19 and then tried unsuccessfully to generate similar hysteria over the gay-spread monkeypox virus.
Clearly desperate for a new health scare — especially after America formally rejected the World Health Organization — outlets seized upon reports of a deadly outbreak of hantavirus last month among passengers and crew of the MV Hondius, a Dutch cruise ship carrying 147 souls embarking from the southern tip of the Andes mountains in South America to the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco.
'We should shy away from making bold pronouncements that may prove dangerously misleading weeks or months later.'
While some publications rushed to attack emerging theories about the nature of the virus, including the notion that it was cooked up in a lab — narrative attacks that neglected to mention a recent gain-of function experiment involving hantaviruses — others pushed alarmist headlines such as:
- “Is hantavirus the next COVID? Is the U.S. response on point? An outbreak update” — NPR
- “Why hantavirus is giving us a 'sinking feeling,' despite experts' reassurance” — Canadian state media
- “Fears rat virus has spread to seven countries” — The Telegraph
- “Could human-transmitted hantavirus be the next pandemic threat?” — The Week
- “Hantavirus: Many unknowns surround an 'unprecedented and worrying' outbreak” — Le Monde
Despite provocative headlines and framing, many media outfits and experts have acknowledged that it is extremely unlikely that there will be a hantavirus epidemic, let alone a pandemic — though a news article at CNN cautioned against “calm-mongering” over hantavirus lest “post-COVID anxiety” be triggered.
A new article in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, for instance, emphasized that while the suspected variety of hantavirus on the MV Hondius “can cause severe disease, high case fatality, and intense public anxiety when they emerge in mobile or closed settings,” such “outbreaks are not frequent” and are “unlikely to become a global outbreak.”
Hantavirus is a family of potentially deadly single-stranded RNA viruses that are naturally found in rodents. Only 890 cases of hantavirus were reported in the U.S. between 1993 and 2023, 35% of them fatal.
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When spread to humans, hantaviruses can cause two diseases: hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome — a condition affecting the kidneys — and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, which affects the lungs.
The hantavirus affecting people on the MV Hondius, the HPS-associated Andes strain, is unique.
Whereas other strains leap from rodents to humans, the Andes virus — symptoms of which appear anywhere from four to 42 days after exposure — has been reported to transmit from person to person via saliva droplets and other oral fluids, although this transmission theory has not been definitively proven.
The breakout on the cruise ship, which has so far claimed the lives of three people, is hardly unprecedented in terms of alleged mass human transmissions of the disease — at least where South America is concerned.
From November 2018 through February 2019 in Chubut Province, Argentina, there was, for instance, a person-to-person outbreak that resulted in 34 confirmed infections and 11 deaths.
Amid continued uncertainty over the genesis of the latest outbreak and media fearmongering, a wide range of theories have emerged about the rodent-borne virus.
Having heard for years about the various efforts to enhance the transmissibility, virulence, or host range of certain viruses, some have speculated that human-to-human transmission of hantavirus points to gain-of-function experimentation.
While there’s been nothing yet to suggest that the virus responsible for the breakout on the Hondius was the result of intentional genetic meddling, scientists have previously modified viruses incorporating hantavirus components and increased their viral fitness in a lab setting. This is similar to the controversial work done on bat coronaviruses at the lab in Wuhan, China.
Hantaviruses are considered a bioagent requiring Biosafety Level 3 containment for research and viral propagation. Consequently, BSL-2 laboratories won’t cut it.
However, a peer-reviewed study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in 2019 by the American Society for Microbiology describes how researchers developed a work-around for conducting hantavirus research in a lower biocontainment-security BSL-2 laboratory.
Researchers tried to make a safer chimeric virus — which is a hybrid virus created by piecing together parts of two different viruses. They used a relatively weaker virus, vesicular stomatis virus, as the main body, and then attached the entry proteins from the more dangerous hantavirus to the outside so that it could infiltrate and infect cells.
This new recombinant virus — the result of an artificial mash-up of genetic material — apparently started acting just like a real hantavirus and underwent a series of mutations to become more infective:
Serial passage of the rescued rVSV-HTNV Gn/Gc virus markedly increased its infectivity and capacity for cell-to-cell spread. This gain in viral fitness was associated with the acquisition of two point mutations: I532K in the cytoplasmic tail of Gn and S1094L in the membrane-proximal stem of Gc. Follow-up experiments with rVSVs and single-cycle VSV pseudotypes confirmed these results. Mechanistic studies revealed that both mutations were determinative and contributed to viral infectivity in a synergistic manner.
The lead researcher on the 2019 study declined Blaze News' request for comment.
This study is anything but a smoking gun. Whereas the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have originated in the neighborhood of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous gain-of-function experiments were being conducted on coronaviruses, the Hondius outbreak seemingly took place a world away from this ostensibly low-danger hantavirus study.
Still, researchers have yet to provide a comprehensive and satisfying explanation for how the Andes virus spreads, prompting speculation that members of the scientific community that possibly manufactured the SARS-COV-2 virus are again not being entirely forthright about what they know and don’t know regarding the Hondius outbreak.
“Public health officials have to be more honest and more humble about how this virus actually spreads,” noted Joseph Allen, professor of exposure assessment science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “An essential lesson from COVID is that officials should be candid about communicating that we are often learning in real time, and we should shy away from making bold pronouncements that may prove dangerously misleading weeks or months later.”
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The $1 billion Chinese text scam flooding Americans’ phones
A recent Wall Street Journal article has exposed the real culprit behind the incessant threatening text messages Americans all over the country have been receiving as of late — which include threats over late toll payments, U.S. postal service fees, and unpaid traffic violations.
According to the Wall Street Journal, these texts are always “poised to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit card details,” and those behind it “take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing, and cosmetics.”
And behind the messages are criminal organizations operating out of China — who have made more than $1 billion over the past three years off the scam.
“Wow,” BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler comments, shocked. “I think we can all speak to this personally. I know, for me at least, I’m receiving just dozens and dozens of these things — way more than I used to.”
These criminal gangs use “SIM farms” — which are rooms jammed with boxes of networking devices — to flood people with text messages.
“You know, you neglected to pay a toll, and now you better watch out or your credit score is going to get hacked, and you’re going to be thrown in jail, and your car is going to be taken away unless you click this really shady-looking URL and give us your credit card number, and then we’re going to steal from you,” Wheeler says.
At these SIM farms — which have been found in shared offices, crack houses, and auto repair shops — the servers are “stuffed with little white cards,” the Wall Street Journal writes, “that mobile customers put in their new phones to begin making calls or sending texts.”
And Wheeler explains that it’s the Chinese communists behind it.
“The Chinese communists are stealing from us to the tune of $1 billion, just by that particular text message scam alone over the course of the past three years — $1 billion. And this, I am sad to say, is just another example of a crime committed against us by the crafty Chinese communists,” she says.
“They are not merely adversarial trading partners in a globalist economy. The Chinese Communists actively, desperately want to depose the United States and destroy us, and they’re doing so by disrupting our society socially and culturally,” Wheeler continues.
“They are attempting to destroy our economy. They are sowing civil unrest,” she says. “For goodness sake, they created a virus that spiraled us into tyranny.”
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NIH scrubs Biden-era COVID origin narrative from website following Blaze News reporting
The National Institutes of Health told Blaze News on Friday that it updated its website to remove claims from the previous administration that dismissed the COVID-19 lab leak theory.
'The NIH has removed these factually incorrect positions from the last administration.'
As of Thursday, an NIH webpage stated:
Unfortunately, because the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 have not yet been identified, misleading and false allegations have been made about NIAID-supported research on naturally occurring bat coronaviruses. Specifically, these allegations have targeted research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, funded through a subaward from NIAID grantee EcoHealth Alliance. The naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied through this subaward were significantly, genetically different from SARS-CoV-2 and, therefore, could not have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Blaze News contacted the NIH, inquiring whether it was aware of the webpage — which was last reviewed in March 2022 — and if it had plans to update its website to remove statements that the lab leak theory was a hoax.
The NIH responded on Friday, stating that it had recently updated the website.
Department of Health and Human Services communications director Andrew Nixon stated, "The Biden era NIH position on origin of the COVID pandemic — that the lab leak theory is a 'conspiracy theory' — is out of line with the considerable scientific and forensic evidence to the contrary. The NIH has removed these factually incorrect positions from the last administration."
RELATED: COVID lab leak denial lingers on NIH’s website: 'Misleading and false'
Blaze News confirmed that as of Friday afternoon, the NIH had taken down the webpage. It now reads, "You are not authorized to access this page."
Nixon added that the "true origin" of the virus could be found on the White House's website, which states that COVID-19 "possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature" and that the data supports that cases stemmed from "a single introduction into humans." The website further notes the Wuhan lab's "history of conducting gain-of-function research ... at inadequate biosafety levels."
The Trump administration's National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya was one of the prominent voices during the COVID era insisting that there was a cover-up regarding the origins of the virus.
Bhattacharya told Politico in May that he is "convinced" the research experiments in Wuhan, China, "led to this pandemic through a lab leak."
RELATED: Damning new episode of BlazeTV's 'The Coverup' blows lid off Biden's 10-year pardon for Fauci
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COVID lab leak denial lingers on NIH’s website: 'Misleading and false'
Allegations that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak were strongly and swiftly denied by the former Biden administration and some prominent health officials, despite dissenting opinions within the medical field, including from Jay Bhattacharya, who now serves as President Donald Trump's National Institutes of Health director.
'I'm convinced that research agenda led to this pandemic through a lab leak in China, in Wuhan.'
A page on the NIH's website, last reviewed by the agency on March 16, 2022, has not yet been updated by the new administration, still claiming that the leak theory is "misleading and false."
The NIH webpage reads:
Unfortunately, because the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 have not yet been identified, misleading and false allegations have been made about NIAID-supported research on naturally occurring bat coronaviruses. Specifically, these allegations have targeted research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, funded through a subaward from NIAID grantee EcoHealth Alliance. The naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied through this subaward were significantly, genetically different from SARS-CoV-2 and, therefore, could not have caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bhattacharya was one of the voices amid the COVID-era insisting that there was a cover-up of the virus' origins.
In a May interview with Politico, Bhattacharya stated that he believes the U.S. should do more to reveal the origins of the virus, but noted that China has not been cooperating with those investigations.
"There's enough evidence that I've seen from the outside that suggests that there was at the very least a cover-up of dangerous experiments that were done in China with — by the way — the help of the U.S. and also Germany and the U.K.," Bhattacharya told the news outlet.
RELATED: NIH staffers storm out as Bhattacharya delivers reality bombshell about COVID origin
He referred to the experiments as "a very, very dangerous kind of utopian research agenda."
"I'm convinced that research agenda led to this pandemic through a lab leak in China, in Wuhan," Bhattacharya continued. "But that was a global effort."
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He called it "absolutely striking" that then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci and other leaders would invest so much effort into suppressing the theory and "denigrating scientists who very legitimately raised this possibility."
Blaze News contacted the NIH to determine whether it is aware of the webpage dismissing lab leak claims and if it plans to update its website. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Rand Paul to refile criminal referral of Fauci to DOJ after Biden autopen revelations
Anthony Fauci was among the individuals with questionable track records who received controversial pardons just prior to former President Joe Biden leaving office.
Fauci, the fifth director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, specifically received a "full and unconditional" pass for possible federal crimes going back to Jan. 1, 2014 — around the time the Obama administration supposedly halted funding for dangerous gain-of-function research.
'Dr. Fauci, as you are aware, it is a crime to lie to Congress.'
Molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University, a leading critic of Fauci's flirtations with gain-of-function research, previously provided Blaze News with insights into why Fauci might require an accountability shield, noting that he "violated federal policies on gain-of-function and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research, committed conspiracy to defraud and perjury, used federal funds to commit crimes, and caused and covered up the cause of a pandemic that killed 20 million and cost $25 trillion."
The Oversight Project revealed earlier this year that like the other pardons hastily dispensed before Biden left office, Fauci's was signed with an automatic signature device. Unfortunately for Fauci, there is presently a great deal of uncertainty over the former president's involvement with the autopen pardons and their legitimacy.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) announced on Monday that he was refiling his criminal referral of Fauci to the Department of Justice. Paul's announcement follows the New York Times' publication of Biden's weak defense of his handlers' use of the autopen along with insights into who was actually behind Fauci's last-minute pardon.
"Perjury is a crime," Paul said on X. "And Fauci must be held accountable."
RELATED: Biden tried defending autopen use to the New York Times. He made it a whole lot worse.
During a Senate hearing in July 2021, Paul pressed Fauci about the National Institutes of Health funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origins of the coronavirus.
"Dr. Fauci, as you are aware, it is a crime to lie to Congress," Paul said.
"On your last trip to our committee on May 11 [2021], you stated that the NIH 'has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.' And yet, gain-of-function research was done entirely in the Wuhan Institute by Dr. Shi and was funded by the NIH," he continued.
'Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.'
Paul's smoking gun was a 2017 WIV paper on SARS-related coronaviruses that discussed gain-of-function work on coronaviruses and acknowledged funding from NIAID as well as from the United States Agency for International Development's Predict program.
"Viruses that in nature only infect animals were manipulated in the Wuhan lab to gain the function of infecting humans," said Paul. "This research fits the definition of the research that the NIH said was subject to the pause in 2014 to 2017 — a pause in funding on gain-of-function."
When afforded an opportunity to retract his previous statement, Fauci instead dug in his heels, stating, "Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement," adding that the study referenced in the 2017 paper was not gain-of-function.
"Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly," added Fauci. "And I want to say that officially."
Paul subsequently referred Fauci to the DOJ, asking then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to open an investigation into the former NIAID director over his testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
The senator noted that contrary to Fauci's suggestion, research conducted "at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and funded under NIAID Award R01AI110964 fits the definition of gain-of-function research."
The recipient of this particular award was Peter Daszak's scandal-plagued organization EcoHealth Alliance, which congressional investigators indicated facilitated gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab and was formally debarred along with Daszak in January by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Paul asked the Biden DOJ again in 2023 to probe Fauci for allegedly lying to Congress after the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released an email apparently showing the former NIAID director acknowledge that gain-of-function was indeed taking place at a Chinese institution which the U.S. Government Accountability Office confirmed had received NIH funding along with the WIV.
— (@)
Blaze News has reached out to Paul's office and the DOJ for comment.
Paul's referral comes on the heels of autopen bombshells printed in the New York Times.
Biden told the Times in a phone interview on Thursday that he orally communicated his clemency directions to aides, that the autopen was used liberally because they were dealing with "a whole lot of people" — a record number, actually — and that he did not personally approve every individual categorical clemency.
The White House emails turned over to investigators by the National Archives and reviewed by the Times also cast doubt on the provenance of Fauci's pardon and others like it issued in Biden's final hours in office.
The emails reportedly indicated that the former president's clemency instructions were written up on the basis of hearsay by aides to Biden advisers, then executed by the master of the autopen, Biden White House staff secretary Stefanie Feldman. When it came to the high-profile autopen pardons issued on Biden's final day, the final approval reportedly came not from Biden but from his chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients.
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Trump bans dangerous gain-of-function research, but will Congress follow through?
Yesterday, President Trump signed an executive order banning federal funding for gain-of-function research abroad, particularly in countries like China and Iran, deemed to have insufficient research oversight. The order also pauses certain domestic research involving infectious pathogens and toxins until a safer, more transparent policy is developed. It aims to reduce the risk of lab-related incidents, like those associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, but doesn’t hinder U.S. innovation in biotechnology.
“This could be one of the most consequential things that Donald Trump will do in his entire presidency,” “Blaze News Tonight” host Jill Savage says.
“This is something that’s just pure justice that needed to be done to save this country from all the crap that we’ve been through in the last few years,” adds Blaze News editor in chief and co-host Matthew Peterson.
He notes that even President Obama, in response to concerns about biosafety risks following lab incidents, paused federal funding for certain gain-of-function research. Fauci, however, “thwarted Obama” and took his research abroad.
“Fauci was able to weasel his way out and continue this dangerous research throughout the world,” Peterson says. “This has to end,” and Trump’s executive order “is a great beginning.”
While it is certainly a good start, Jill points out the obvious next step: “We need people in Congress to step up to the plate.”
“In order to implement the mandate, you need Congress,” Peterson agrees, adding that sadly, “there isn’t a sense of urgency with a lot of these people.”
“Congress isn’t used to getting the job done,” he says. They like to “wait out the executive” and “slow roll things.”
That’s why it’s “vital that everyone out there start calling them and putting pressure on your congressmen.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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White House endorses COVID lab leak theory, but will anyone be held accountable?
On April 18, the White House publicly endorsed the COVID lab leak theory. The government’s official COVID website was also redirected to a new page titled “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19,” which contends that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China, and was leaked by accident.
The revamped site criticizes Anthony Fauci, David Morens, Andrew Cuomo, the WHO, EcoHealth Alliance, and the Biden administration, among others, for actively promoting false information and covering up the truth.
It cites five points to support the lab leak claim:
1. “The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.”
2. “Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.”
3. “Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research (gene altering and organism supercharging) at inadequate biosafety levels.”
4. “Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.”
5. “By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced. But it hasn’t.”
After years of the Biden administration and his loyal media allies promoting a lie, it’s refreshing to see the government proclaim the truth.
But while Glenn Beck sees the website as “an amazing thing,” the information on it isn’t exactly news.
“Most of this stuff we had within six or eight months of the actual outbreak,” he says.
The real question is: “Who’s going to jail over this?”
The other question is: Why doesn’t the legacy media seem interested in correcting the narrative?
“Millions of people died here. You'd think that it would be something [the media] would focus on and draw a lot of attention to and continue to kind of beat the drum until someone was held responsible, and they don't seem to have any interest in that,” says co-host Stu Burguiere, noting that most of these outlets “have run an op-ed” about the lab leak theory and called it good.
“If we make a mistake, we correct it because it drives us crazy that we made the mistake, and I don’t want anybody to believe that I’m standing behind something that is wrong and a lie,” says Glenn.
The legacy media clearly doesn’t have the same convictions.
“They knowingly lied” about COVID, Joe Biden’s cognitive state, and Russiagate, and yet, “There’s no consequence.”
“They’re not going to lose any advertisers. The New York Times hasn't lost any real money because of this. Their people just continue to watch,” says Glenn.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip above.
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'An outrage': Biden admin hid report of US service members getting sick at Wuhan military games in October 2019
Nearly 10,000 athletes from over 109 countries traveled to Wuhan, China, to compete in the 7th Military World Games from October 18 to October 28, 2019.
Participants from various nations, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Luxembourg, reported taking ill with COVID-like symptoms at or after the games — a damning coincidence granted the games took place near the suspected origin of the virus, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous experiments were long performed with poor safety protocols on coronaviruses.
The Biden administration apparently sat on a December 2022 report indicating that some of the 263 members of the U.S. delegation who attended the games may have also caught COVID-19 or something just like it months before the supposed zoonotic leap at a wet market.
By concealing the document, the administration effectively left the public with then-Pentagon spokesman John Kirby's 2021 assertion to the Washington Post that there was no knowledge of American infections at the games and no evidence to indicate U.S. military personnel were infected before travel restrictions were implemented in early 2020.
The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act included a requirement that former President Joe Biden's then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin submit to congressional lawmakers a report on the military games detailing:
- the number of American athletes and staff "who attended the 2019 World Military Games and became ill with COVID-19-like symptoms during or shortly after their return to the United States";
- the results of any blood testing done on American participants;
- the number of home station Pentagon facilities of participating members that experienced outbreaks in early 2020; and
- whether the Pentagon discussed the illnesses surrounding the games with other militaries.
In addition to disclosing such information to the House and Senate armed services committees, the NDAA required that the Biden administration make the report publicly available.
'It is an outrage that the Biden White House and the 118th Congress Senate and House Armed Services Committees did not publicly release this information.'
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration refrained from releasing the report to the public, and it wasn't until March 2025 when the Trump administration uploaded it to the Defense Department website that the document became widely accessible.
Contrary to Kirby's suggestion that there was no knowledge or evidence of infection, the Pentagon concluded that of the 263 total American participants in the game — of whom 2019 were military personnel — seven service members "exhibited COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms during the timeframe of October 18, 2019, through January 21, 2020."
Members of the U.S. delegation to the games were not tested for COVID-19 or antibodies "as testing was not available at this early stage of the pandemic," so there is apparently no definitive proof these were indeed COVID-19 infections.
The report indicated the symptoms could have been caused by other respiratory infections and that all seven infected service members' symptoms resolved within six days.
The report noted further that there was "no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them."
Molecular biologist Dr. Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University told the Free Beacon, "It is an outrage that the Biden White House and the 118th Congress Senate and House Armed Services Committees did not publicly release this information when it became available in 2022, but, instead, withheld this information for the duration of their terms."
"This new information strengthens U.S. and allied intelligence data indicating that COVID-19 was circulating in Wuhan in October-November 2019, U.S. and allied intelligence data indicating that researchers working with genetically enhanced SARS viruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology contracted COVID-19 in October-November 2019, and phylogenomic data indicating that the virus that causes COVID-19 entered humans in July-November 2019," added Ebright.
Sen. Jodi Ernst (R-Iowa) told the Free Beacon that the report helped put a nail in the coffin of the theory that the virus originated in a Wuhan wet market in December 2019.
"Taxpayers deserve to know the truth about COVID-19 origins, but the Biden administration concealed this information from the American people for years," said Ernst. "This report should have been made public immediately and not restricted to Washington insiders. If Americans visiting Wuhan were potentially infected with the COVID-19 virus in October 2019, those claiming the pandemic began in a wet market just two months later would be completely off base."
Ahead of the games — as early as August 2019 — hospitals in the region were apparently overwhelmed with an unseasonably high number of patients, while regional queries for the terms "diarrhea" and "cough" spiked on China's equivalent of Google.
An American researcher and several European researchers noted their suspicions in a September 2022 study that the Wuhan games "may have contributed to the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2" but indicated that "no official information has been made available despite reports that some foreign participants experienced Covid-19-compatible symptoms that were attributed to influenza or gastroenteritis."
French pentathlete Elodie Clouvel, Luxembourg swimmer Julien Henx, German volleyball player Jacqueline Brock, and Italian fencer Matteo Tagliariol also indicated they and/or members of their team got sick while in Wuhan.
Brock indicated in early 2020 that "after a few days, some athletes from my team got ill, I got sick in the last two days."
"I have never felt so sick," continued Brock. "Either it was a very bad cold or COVID-19."
Tagliariol told Corriere della Sera, "When we arrived in Wuhan, almost all of us got sick. But the worst was returning home. After a week I had a very high fever, I felt like I couldn't breathe."
Canadian military sources told the Financial Post in 2021 that one service member reported feeling "very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia."
Scores of Canadian athletes were apparently placed in isolation on their 12-hour flight home at the end of October. The athletes' symptoms included coughing and diarrhea.
The Canadian Department of National Defense told Blaze News last year that "some athletes experienced gastrointestinal symptoms on the flight to Wuhan for the Military World Games and during the return flight home to Canada."
"Their symptoms and illness course of one to three days were consistent with gastrointestinal illness, or a 'stomach flu,' and were managed as such," said a spokeswoman for the National Defense Department.
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