Even Joe Biden can remember this, which may explain why the White House is in a panic now: in April 2020, President Donald Trump claimed there was evidence that COVID-19 started in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The response was predictable. Trump was lampooned in the media. The “intelligence community” (IC) immediately spread its tentacles to slap down the storytelling. This is the same “intelligence community” that said Hunter Biden’s laptop was fake Russian news, the Steele dossier was real, and that Trump was a Russian secret agent. And don’t even get us started on WMD in Iraq.

Trump was immediately laughed at and called a liar, and four reporters from the New York Times—Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Edward Wong, and Adam Goldman—dismissed Trump as a bully. Yet there was ample concern over the lab; there was so much evidence of problems at the site that it was easier to believe it leaked the bug than to believe it didn’t.

A state department cable warning of safety issues at the Wuhan lab was revealed in 2018—before COVID-19 became front-page news. In 2020, even The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin confirmed the concern over the problems at the lab.

In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology, and health. Last week, WIV [removed] that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.

Here’s a look at what you see when you try to find the report on the WIV lab website.

The English version of the report is still available elsewhere on the internet, as Tucker Carlson of Fox News reported:

The origins of Covid were never a secret. The real story — the greatest outrage — is that the people who knew or should have known the truth lied about it in order to hide the Chinese government’s role in mass murder. pic.twitter.com/Z1gJxsDQHc

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 28, 2023

A top coronavirus researcher who worked with the Wuhan lab and is known as the Bat Lady claimed three years ago that the virus was “intentionally released.”

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Indeed, the Wuhan lab itself bragged in 2014 that it had a breakthrough on bat coronaviruses—the kind of bat coronavirus that could “bind to a human receptor” and that would later somehow infect the world, according to former CDC head Dr. Robert Redfield.

In 2015, the lab became “China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4),” noted The Washington Post’s Rogin.

Then the media’s interest in the origin story of the COVID-19 virus went fallow until a few of the woke cubicle meerkats at The New York Times sniffed the air and attacked U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton for daring to put the Wuhan lab leak on their op-ed pages. Heads rolled, and apologies for the opinion piece proliferated. The Times‘s Alexandra Stevenson was assigned to deride the senator as a conspiracy theorist who pushed “fringe theories.” Stevenson intoned, “Scientists have dismissed suggestions that the Chinese government was behind the outbreak, but it’s the kind of tale that gains traction among those who see China as a threat.”

Fast forward to now, after confirmation in The Wall Street Journal that the COVID virus “most likely” came from the Wuhan lab. Reporters Michael R. Gordon and Warren P. Strobel reported that bioweapons experts at the Lawerence Livermore National Labs at the Department of Energy confirmed that the most likely explanation for COVID-19 was a lab leak. But what do bioweapons experts know?

The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.

After the DOE national lab report was reported exclusively in the Wall Street Journal, The Big Guy and his White House minions went into panic mode.

Biden National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan—who, along with singularly talentless Secretary of State Tony Blinken, brought you the spectacularly disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, the shrink-wrapped cash payoff to the mullahs in Iran, and the Benghazi disaster—is uniquely suited to do clean-up for Biden on the lab leak story. He specializes in creating and defending Democrat disasters.

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It must be hard for The Big Guy, who “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades,” according to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, to admit he’s wrong.

Biden’s point man, Sullivan, told CNN he would neither confirm nor deny the Journal‘s report, but said that “President Biden specifically requested that the national labs, which are part of the Energy Department, be brought into this assessment because he wants to put every tool at use to be able to figure out what happened here.” That’s laudable enough, but then Sullivan seemed to say they didn’t get the answer The Big Guy wanted. There are a variety of opinions in the IC, he explained. “A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information,” he added.

The next day, Feb. 27, the Journal‘s Josh Chin, Lindsay Wise, and Annie Linskey performed the duties of cleaning up the White House response, amplifying Sullivan’s claim of no consensus on the origins of COVID by quoting the National Security Council spokesman, John “Kabul” Kirby.

Kirby said that President Biden is determined to nail down where COVID started, “but there continues to be broad uncertainty within the administration about its origins. He declined to comment on the Journal article.”

He later said in a press briefing:

“’There is not a consensus right now in the U.S. government about exactly how Covid started,” Mr. Kirby said at a briefing Monday. “We’re just not there yet,” he said. “If we have something that is ready to be briefed to the American people and the Congress, we will do that.”

This is the same crew who brought you the “consensus” that Hunter Biden’s laptop “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” faithfully transcribed by Politico’s Natasha Bertrand. They’re the same political organization pushing the idea that there’s “scientific consensus” on the “climate catastrophe” and using it as a bludgeon against scientists whose science doesn’t agree.

And Donald Trump had hookers peeing on Russian hotel beds.

Former CDC head Dr. Robert Redfield, who publicly averred the likelihood of a lab leak years ago, said that “scientists finally looked at the science and concluded the virus didn’t start in nature, but was taught to immediately infect humans and make it more transmissible between. The virus had to be taught that behavior and that was done in the lab… I think these scientists finally really went and looked at the science and said the science doesn’t add up [that] this was out of nature.”

COVID didn’t come from a lab, cloth masks work, children easily transmit COVID, natural immunity doesn’t work against COVID, the only thing that will help is a vaccine, and there are no heart problems from the shot—these are also lies told by the same cadre of scientists who now dismiss the lab leak evidence.

Fox News’s Martha MacCallum told Redfield, “yeah, well, we were told they were looking at the science all along. We were told to shut up and not say that… it might have come from the lab. That was laughed [and] scoffed at.” She listed how the disease loosed upon the world changed our economy, education, and so much more. It hollowed out our economy, attacked freedom of movement and speech, thereby dispiriting Americans, and resulted in millions of disaffected people leaving the workforce, perhaps for good.

No wonder the Democrats want to buy political time, pretending to wait for “consensus” and knowing they’ll never let it happen.

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