No. of Recommendations: 5
The Big Story
As President Joe Biden’s team weighs preemptive blanket pardons for figures such as former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci, and as Democrats drape themselves in the flag to defend “woke” senior Pentagon officials against an expected onslaught from Trump “loyalists,” a handful of recent reports support longstanding allegations that the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment played a role in causing, and then covering up the origins of, the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an interview with the British paper The Sun published on Sunday, retired Pentagon intelligence official Jon Myers said that in October 2019, he began briefing the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, had leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. If true, that would suggest that the U.S. intelligence community and Pentagon brass were aware of the virus—and aware that it likely came from a lab—two months before the officially acknowledged start of the pandemic. Myers, a former Marine Corps officer who served as a director of regional intelligence at the Pentagon from 2018 to 2020, told the Sun:
This [COVID-19] was briefed in October and November 2019 as a lab leak. It’s important that people realise. It was in the intelligence. We briefed it. It was accepted. I briefed it numerous times about a viral outbreak and that it was from a lab. Over the course of late November and December, it probably came up six or seven times in briefings. Nobody said, “hey I heard that was not true, it was not from a lab.” It was just stated as fact.
Yet by April 2020 (at which point Myers had retired), the JCS had publicly assessed that the virus had a natural origin—an assessment that Myers dismissed as both “political” and concocted for the purposes of “self-preservation.” Myers’ interview follows a report earlier this month from the GOP-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic (HSSCP), which revealed that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had received classified intelligence about the COVID-19 outbreak in China before the Chinese government announced it in a public notice on PubMed Dec. 31, 2019. Two previous Democrat-led congressional reports—one from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the other from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, both in 2022—had claimed the DIA did not learn of the virus until the New Year’s Eve PubMed announcement.
Though Myers does not say who was trying to preserve themselves or why, there has long been speculation (including at The Scroll) that the virus that emerged in Wuhan might have had a connection to the U.S. defense and intelligence establishment. In 2018, Peter Daszak of the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) and virologist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (UNC) submitted a research grant proposal, known as DEFUSE, to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Though DARPA rejected the proposal, drafts and notes from the proposal revealed that Baric and Daszak intended to use gain-of-function engineering to create a virus with the exact genomic specifications of SARS-CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Molecular biologist Richard Ebright called this revelation the “equivalent of a smoking gun” for establishing the responsibility of Daszak and his associates for the pandemic after journalist Emily Kopp reported it in January.
EHA received more than $123 million in funding from the U.S. government between 2013 and 2020, including $39 million from the Pentagon and $64.7 million from the U.S. Agency for International Aid and Development (USAID), which has historically been used as a cutout for the Central Intelligence Agency. A CIA whistleblower told the HSSCP last year that after six of the seven analysts tasked by the agency to investigate the virus’s origins concluded that it had likely escaped from a lab, the CIA offered them “financial incentives” to reverse their decision, as Tablet reported at the time. In the declassified COVID-19 origins report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA said it was “unable to determine” the origin of the virus.
And at least some former senior health officials suspect a U.S. coverup. In a podcast appearance last month, former director of the Centers for Disease Control Robert Redfield appeared to endorse the theory that the DEFUSE proposal was the ultimate source of the pandemic. Speaking on The Dana Parish Podcast, Redfield said he believed COVID-19 was “intentionally engineered as a part of a biodefense program” and that the U.S. government, including the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health, and USAID bore “substantial” responsibility for the pandemic. Identifying Baric, specifically, as the “mastermind” behind the virus, Redfield said, “There is a real possibility that the virus’s birthplace was Chapel Hill,” North Carolina—the home of Baric’s employer, UNC.
