Last week we noted reporting by journalist Alex Berensen, who cited two large German newspapers in revealing that Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has long had evidence that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a US-funded lab in Wuhan, China.
According to these reports, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe in 2020, the German government commissioned a secret intelligence operation under the codename of Saaremaa to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2. When they concluded that a lab leak was most likely, the German Chancellery ordered that the results were to be kept hidden from the public.
The UK Knew Too...
Now, the Daily Mail reports that "a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility."
Except that Patrick Vallance, the UK's equivalent of Anthony Fauci, quashed it.
A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.
The file, marked 'Secret – Recipient's Eyes Only' argued that Beijing was pushing a fake narrative that the virus had originated in an animal market. The dossier, compiled by a group of eminent academics and intelligence experts and seen by The Mail on Sunday, said China even retrospectively manipulated viral samples to give credence to the deception.
But the argument is said to have been dismissed by Patrick Vallance, who was a familiar face during the pandemic as he flanked Mr Johnson at No 10 news conferences.
In a new statement from Dearlove, he writes that "Boris himself was persuaded by its argument. But the weight of the Government's scientific establishment, already signed up to the Chinese narrative, prevailed."
Last night, a source close to Mr Johnson pointed the finger at Lord Vallance for rubbishing the lab-leak theory in order to appease the Chinese government. The source said: 'Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid. It struck him as simply too much of a coincidence that a mutant Covid virus appeared in a city that just happened to possess one of the only labs in the world that engineered mutant Covid viruses.
This is pretty huge, also personally disconcerting because this is what I also suspected in 2020, but would have been basically impossible to report and maintain a career at that time: Western intelligence not only asserted with high probability WIV leaked Covid, but knew PRC… https://t.co/FVnCP1QO77
— Sam Cooper (@scoopercooper) March 16, 2025
NYT Offers Lame 'Mea Culpa'
In light of the two reports, the NY Times - which peddled natural origin propaganda while slamming lab-leak proponents, has penned a mea culpa of sorts that boils down to 'we had bad information, oops!'
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions may have been terrifyingly lax.
Let's Review
Baric asked Shi if he could have the genetic data for SHC014. “She was gracious enough to send us those sequences almost immediately,” he says. His team introduced the virus modified with that code into mice and into a petri dish of human airway cells. Sure enough, the chimera exhibited “robust replication” in the human cells—evidence that nature was full of coronaviruses ready to leap directly to people.
emails released a year after the pandemic’s beginning showed that Andersen initially thought the virus had been genetically engineered. However, after a phone call with Fauci and another major virology funder, Jeremy Farrar, then with the Wellcome Trust, Andersen reversed course.