Two newly uncovered documents - one from the Defense Department and another from a medical intelligence unit within the Pentagon - are renewing scrutiny over how the U.S. government handled early leads about the origins of COVID-19.
Released years after the fact, the documents suggest that top military and intelligence officials either ignored or downplayed signs that the coronavirus may have originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China - raising new questions about transparency and accountability, according to Just the News' Jerry Dunleavy.
One report, authored by the Defense Department’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness in December 2022 but quietly published online only in recent weeks, confirms that the Pentagon never conducted an investigation into whether U.S. service members may have been infected during the 2019 World Military Games held in Wuhan - a city that would soon become ground zero for the COVID-19 outbreak.
A second report, produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) and dated June 2020, asserts that “the molecular biology capabilities of [the Wuhan lab] and genome assessment are consistent with the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-engineered virus.” The analysis, obtained this week through the Freedom of Information Act by the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, remained classified for nearly five years.
The revelations follow years of contentious debate over the virus’s origins, with many scientists and political leaders initially dismissing the possibility of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory. Yet, as more evidence emerges, the narrative is increasingly shifting.
Pentagon Report: No Testing, No Investigation
The newly released Pentagon document - just three pages long and first revealed by the Washington Free Beacon, details a minimal response to concerns that American service members may have contracted COVID-19 during the 2019 World Military Games in Wuhan. The report states that seven U.S. military athletes who attended the event reported COVID-19-like symptoms between October 2019 and January 2020. All seven recovered within six days, and none were tested for COVID-19 or antibodies. The reason? “Testing was not available at this early stage of the pandemic.”
The Defense Department “has not conducted or opened an investigation into connections between the outbreak of COVID-19 and the 2019 World Military Games,” the report acknowledges. Nor did the Pentagon initiate any discussions with allied militaries about illnesses potentially linked to the games.
The report was mandated by Congress in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which required that the findings be made public. However, it was not uploaded to a public-facing government website until late March of this year — more than a year after it was submitted to congressional committees.
Intelligence Analysis Suggested Lab Leak Early On
Equally significant is the disclosure of an internal 2020 assessment by the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence. The analysis, titled “SARS-COV-2 Genome Analysis”, concluded that the genetic characteristics of the virus were consistent with laboratory engineering. It noted that the virus could have been “part of a bank of chimeric viruses in Zhen-Li Shi's lab at [the Wuhan Institute of Virology] that escaped containment.”
This finding directly contradicts claims made in early 2020 by a group of influential scientists - many of whom were recipients of federal funding - who published the “Proximal Origin” paper dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis. Emails and subsequent reporting have since shown that Dr. Anthony Fauci and other senior officials were involved in prompting that publication.
Military scientists who reviewed the “Proximal Origin” article at the time pushed back. In a separate working paper written in May 2020 and published in 2023 by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, NCMI experts criticized the article’s conclusions, writing: “The evidence Anderson et al. present does not lessen the plausibility of laboratory origin.”
Despite these findings, sources told multiple outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The Australian, that Pentagon and intelligence community leadership prevented these assessments from being disseminated. One source said that in 2021, DIA leadership instructed NCMI scientists not to share their findings with the FBI.
Global Ramifications and Chinese InfoWar
In the early days of the pandemic, China pushed counter-narratives, including pointing the finger at U.S. troops who attended the Wuhan military games. The U.S. Department of Defense, under both Trump and Biden administrations, publicly rejected those assertions.
Still, Republican lawmakers have argued for years that the World Military Games may have been a “super-spreader” event. A 2021 report from the House Foreign Affairs Committee suggested that COVID-19 may have begun spreading in Wuhan as early as August or September 2019. The report cited satellite imagery showing increased activity at local hospitals and interviews with athletes who fell ill shortly after the games.
According to an August 2021 GOP report, "To further drive this narrative, CCP-controlled media outlets accused Maatje Benassi, a member of the U.S. Army Reserve, as being ‘patient zero.’ Benassi competed at the Military World Games without becoming ill … Two weeks after Zhao tweeted that the U.S. army brought the virus to Wuhan, the Global Times amplified the narrative."
After then-FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed in early 2023 that the FBI had long assessed that a lab leak was the most likely origin for COVID-19, the Chinese government returned to its efforts to shift blame to the U.S. military.
“At present, more and more clues from the international science community are pointing the origins of virus to sources around the world. Many have raised questions and concerns about US bio-military bases at Fort Detrick and around the world,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said in March 2023.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry also responded to the CIA’s new assessment earlier this year that the U.S. spy agency had “low confidence” leaning toward a lab leak hypothesis by arguing that “the U.S. needs to stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing at once, and stop scapegoating others” and attempting to point the finger at “relevant U.S. biological labs.” -Just the News
Robert Redfield, former CDC Director under President Trump, said in March 2021 that the virus “most likely” originated at the Wuhan lab and began circulating in Wuhan in the fall of 2019.
Growing Calls for Transparency
While President Biden signed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, vowing to declassify as much information as possible, critics say key intelligence has been withheld. A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) offered little clarity, citing “low confidence” among most intelligence agencies regarding the virus’s origins.
Yet both the FBI and the Department of Energy - agencies with advanced scientific expertise - have publicly said they assess, with varying levels of confidence, that a lab-related origin is likely.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in January that COVID-19 was “most likely originated from a lab leak,” although the agency maintains “low confidence” in that assessment. He testified to Congress in 2023 that the intelligence community had sufficient evidence to conclude a lab origin was the most plausible explanation — but chose not to do so due to the geopolitical consequences with China.
Rutgers professor Richard Ebright, who has been outspoken on COVID-19 origins, told Just the News, “It has been clear for some time that all informed scientists - without exception - believed by early 2020 that COVID likely started with a lab incident in Wuhan, but that most chose to lie for five years.”
A Pattern of Suppression?
The revelations add to a growing body of evidence that internal assessments at high levels of the U.S. government were sidelined or buried. Reports suggest that scientists within the DIA, as well as at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Army Medical Research Institute, favored the lab leak theory - but their voices were not reflected in official intelligence community assessments.
By most accounts, the Biden Administration largely failed or refused to shed further light on the origins of COVID-19. Then-President Biden signed into law the “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023” and claimed that “my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible.” Little key information was released during his presidency, and more and more reports are saying that important findings were suppressed.
Then-DNI Avril Haines released an assessment in August 2021 stating that at least one U.S. agency - revealed later to be the FBI - had “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 came from the lab, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray later confirmed that the FBI has long believed COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab. ODNI released in October 2021 a declassified version of the FBI’s arguments in a section titled “The Case for the Laboratory-Associated Incident Hypothesis.”
Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, sent a letter in December to the DIA’s inspector general asking whether the NCMI’s findings were appropriately included in briefings to President Biden.
Yet despite public pledges, senior officials have yet to fully declassify many of the intelligence documents related to the origins of the pandemic.
And then of course there's Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance - which received large sums of NIH funding which were steered to the Wuhan Lab in order to study bat coronavirus. EcoHealth famously proposed a blueprint for creating COVID-19, which DARPA declined to fund - yet here we are.
As JTN notes further;
Science magazine noted that Daszak was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its leader Shi Zhengli.
Daszak helped organize a February 2020 letter in The Lancet which praised China’s response and called the lab leak a conspiracy theory: “The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin … Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear.”
Despite this, Fauci tried to argue to the BBC in 2022 that Daszak’s letter did not dismiss the lab leak hypothesis.
EcoHealth Alliance had proposed the creation at the Wuhan lab of a virus with features — such as a furin cleavage site — strikingly similar to those found in SARS-CoV-2. It was revealed by The Intercept that EcoHealth had sought funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for this project in 2018, but when the funding was rejected it appears the Wuhan lab moved forward anyway, just a year ahead of the first emergence of COVID-19.
So yeah, huge non-zero chance the US funded the research in Wuhan that ultimately led to COVID-19, and the guy they paid to do it then helped cover it up.
