WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – The Biden administration’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released a report Friday on possible links between China’s controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the worldwide spread of COVID-19, ultimately declining to endorse a firm conclusion on the virus’s origins or share new information with the public.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO)  called the report a “complete joke” containing no information that was not already publicly available, which fell short of the law’s requirements and indicated that Biden was “continu[ing] to shill for China.”

This is a complete joke. 5 pages plus a “summary.” Nothing here not already reported by @WSJ and others. The law requires “any and all information.” REQUIRES, not requests. This isn’t that. Biden continues to shill for China https://t.co/9EVNimOtBn

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) June 24, 2023

In March, President Joe Biden signed Hawley’s COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 that called on the federal government to shed light on how the pandemic started. Biden pledged to “declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.” The bill had received unanimous support from Democrats and Republicans alike.

The resulting DNI report, declassified June 23, opens with a disclaimer that it “does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses, nor does it explore other biological facilities in Wuhan other than the WIV.” 

It notes that different federal agencies hold to different explanations, with the National Intelligence Council and “four other IC agencies” endorsing “natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor,” while the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) consider a “laboratory-associated incident” most likely. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) does not endorse one theory over another, but “almost all IC agencies” agree COVID was not genetically engineered.

“Information available to the IC indicates that some of the research conducted by the PLA [the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, whose scientists have worked with WIV] and WIV included work with several viruses, including coronaviruses, but no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2,” the report claims. “We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.”

The report concedes that “[s]ome of the WIV’s genetic engineering projects on coronaviruses involved techniques that could make it difficult to detect intentional changes,” and that “[s]ome WIV researchers probably did not use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time prior to the pandemic in handling SARS-like coronaviruses, increasing the risk of accidental exposure to viruses.”

It notes that “[s]everal WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms” that “were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19” and apparently did not require hospitalization. It also cites the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) March 2021 report on WIV officials stating that “lab employee samples all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies,” without addressing longstanding criticisms of the international health body for uncritically accepting various false claims from the Chinese government. Former President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw from the WHO in July 2020, but his successor President Joe Biden canceled the pullout.

Politico reports that House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chair Mike Turner and House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic chair Brad Wenstrup (both Republicans from Ohio) called the report a “promising step toward full transparency,” but the lawmaker who spearheaded the effort to force its release wasn’t nearly as impressed.

The DNI report neglects to contend with, and in some cases appears to directly contradict, developments in the case that have previously been reported, and fails to assuage suspicions that the government is acting out of a vested interest in obscuring any blame it might have for the pandemic.

Publicly, the theory that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab was widely mocked and dismissed ever since Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) floated it in February 2020, and for months any suggestion of it was condemned as misinformation. It was not until mid-2021, well after Democrats had retaken the White House, that mainstream media outlets began to acknowledge it as a possibility.

One focal point of the issue has been former White House COVID adviser and National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director Dr. Anthony Fauci, given his role in supporting the research that may have eventually led to COVID by approving funding for medical non-government organization EcoHealth Alliance to explore gain-of-function (GOF) research, which entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects, on coronaviruses, at several sites, including WIV.

Fauci and his defenders insisted that the work NIAID approved was not gain-of-function research and could not have led to COVID, but in January 2022 the conservative investigators of Project Veritas released documents they obtained showing that, before going to NIAID, EcoHealth previously pitched its funding request to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which rejected it on the grounds that the project would violate a preexisting moratorium on GOF research and failed to account for its potential risks.

Since then, leaked emails have revealed that Fauci, former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Dr. Francis Collins, and other top researchers were aware of the lab-leak possibility as early as February 2020 but feared publicly acknowledging it would impair “science and international harmony.”

In March, the Washington Examiner reported that in early 2020, Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute and Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University notified Fauci that they took seriously suspicions that COVID first escaped from WIV, with Andersen writing that “one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” and that COVID’s genome seemed “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

In March, however, both signed onto a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” (Proximal Origin), which concluded the lab-leak hypothesis was not “plausible.” LifeSiteNews has reported that Fauci himself had input into the final draft, which was not initially disclosed. The Examiner’s review found that, from 2020 to 2022, research projects led by Andersen and Garry received $25.2 million in NIH grants.

Andrew Huff, a former U.S. Army infantryman in Iraq, research fellow in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and vice president-turned-whistleblower for EcoHealth, has also attested that COVID’s origins trace back to U.S. federal funding overseen by Fauci and the federal government.