Although FBI Director Christopher Wray dodged his way through a Tuesday night interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, he answered one question with remarkable clarity.
Referencing Sunday’s report in The Wall Street Journal, Baier noted that the Energy Department had revised its assessment of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on new intelligence, the agency now concludes with “low confidence” that the virus originated from an accidental laboratory leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.
According to the Journal, the FBI had last revised its assessment in 2021 when it concluded with “moderate confidence” that the pandemic began with a lab leak.
Baier asked Wray if the FBI still stands behind this position and Wray’s reply was unusually forthcoming. “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” he said.
Wray continued, “The FBI has folks, agents, professionals, analysts, virologists, microbiologists, etcetera, who focus specifically on the dangers of biological threats which include things like novel viruses, like COVID, and the concerns that in the wrong hands, some bad guys, a hostile nation state, a terrorist, a criminal, the threats that those could pose.
“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.”
He told Baier that most of the details are classified before concluding with this: “I will just make the observation that the Chinese government seems to me has been doing it’s best to try to thwart and try to obfuscate the work here … and that’s unfortunate for everybody.”
🚨BREAKING: FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the origin of COVID was likely the result of a laboratory leak in China pic.twitter.com/ducPWduotG
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 28, 2023
At the risk of reading too much into one comment, we really do need to ask why Wray would choose to put “biological threats” and “COVID” in the same sentence. It was once considered taboo to even suggest that an engineered virus may have accidentally escaped from the lab where it was engineered. The implication that the Chinese government may have had nefarious intentions was tin hat territory.
Was he just throwing Baier a bone because he hadn’t provided a single honest answer during the interview or is there more to it? There’s no way to know.
It’s also worth noting that up until Tuesday night, no FBI official had ever commented publicly on the origins of the pandemic. The Journal’s sources were individuals who had read a classified report that had been distributed to the White House and to some members of Congress.
The left was out in full force following the interview to say there is absolutely no evidence to prove the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. They pointed to the four intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council which have assessed with “low confidence” the pandemic “was most likely caused by natural exposure to an animal infected with it or a close progenitor virus.”
But there’s no evidence to support that conclusion either.
Those who maintain the virus was transmitted from an infected animal to a human say that’s the way these viruses have behaved in the past. But naturally evolving viruses haven’t been genetically engineered.
Here’s how NPR made the case for the zoonotic origin theory on Tuesday:
So just what is the scientific evidence that the pandemic began at the seafood market?
Neither of the Science papers provide the smoking gun — that is, an animal infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus at a market.
But they come close. They provide photographic evidence of wild animals such as raccoon dogs and a red fox, which can be infected with and shed SARS-CoV-2, sitting in cages in the market in late 2019. What’s more, the caged animals are shown in or near a stall where scientists found SARS-CoV-2 virus on a number of surfaces, including on cages, carts and machines that process animals after they are slaughtered at the market.
Scientific? Hardly.
On Monday, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci told The Boston Globe that “we may never know” the origin of COVID.
“I don’t see any data for a lab leak,” Fauci said. “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened.”
As Wray said, the Chinese have done their “best to try to thwart and try to obfuscate” every attempt to find the answer. All we are left with is circumstantial evidence. And there is “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that COVID-19 came from a lab at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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