Chinese informant allegedly alerted FBI to Wuhan lab leak in early 2020: Report

FBI Director Christopher Wray waited until February 2023 to speak publicly about the bureau's assessment that COVID-19 "most likely" came from the infamous lab in Wuhan, China, where the apparent patients zero executed dangerous gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses.

According to a new report from Michael Shellenberger's investigative outfit, Public, the FBI may have known about a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology years prior — as early as March 2020.

Multiple sources recently spoke to Public, indicating a Chinese national serving as an informant for the FBI in Wuhan revealed to their handler on the bureau's Chinese Intelligence Squad that a "person working at the Virology Institute lab in Wuhan, China was infected, left the building, and spread the virus outside the lab in Wuhan."

It's unclear whether this walking biohazard was one of the WIV researchers the Wall Street Journal first reported were hospitalized in November 2019 "with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness" before the outbreak.

"It didn't have anything to do with the wet market or the bat soup story they were going with," the informant reportedly told the FBI.

Public's sources indicated this information would likely have circulated amongst the 25 people in the Chinese Intelligence Squad. Additionally, the squad would have taken it seriously, granted "the [confidential human source] was from Wuhan, had been vetted, and the person had provided information on three prior occasions that they were able to corroborate as true and reliable."

Another source stressed the lab leak information was regarded as "good intel."

The sources who provided these insights asked Public to keep their identities under wraps, indicating they are only now speaking out "out of concern over abuses of power within the FBI."

This is not the first posthumous blow dealt in recent days to the zoonotic origins theory once advanced by Anthony Fauci and those involved in his seeming cover-up.

On Thursday, the watchdog group U.S. Right to Know published documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests concerning the controversial 2018 "DEFUSE" grant application submitted by Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

According to USRTK, the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, closely resembles the blueprints for the pathogens detailed in the research proposal.

The watchdog indicated that the newly published drafts and notes concerning the grant application reveal researchers, such as University of North Carolina Prof. Ralph Baric, planned on

• inserting furin cleavage sites at the S1/S2 junction of the spike protein;
• assembling synthetic viruses in six segments;
• identifying coronaviruses up to 25% different from SARS;
• and selecting for receptor binding domains well-suited to infecting human receptors.

The proposed furin cleavage site is of special significance because virologists have yet to find it in other related coronaviruses. Many scientists have even expressed doubt that furin cleavage sites are naturally occurring.

USRTK previously reported that in January 2020, Danish evolutionary biologist and Scripps Research Institute immunology professor Kristian G. Andersen raised the matter of a gain-of-function study that "looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory."

Andersen reportedly directed British evolutionary biologist and virologist Edward Holmes' attention to the "furin cleavage site between the S1 and S2 junctions," which had features characteristic of genetic engineering.

Holmes responded by saying, "F***, this is bad."

On Jan. 31, 2020, Andersen wrote to then-Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, saying, "You have to look very closely at the genome to see features that are potentially engineered. … I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie [Holmes], Bob [Garry], Mike [Farzan], and myself all find the genome to be inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."

Fauci downplayed the lab-leak theory on cable news and at the White House podium. Peter Daszak co-signed a Feb. 19, 2020, statement in the Lancet deriding suggestions that the virus might have leaked from the WIV as "conspiracy theories."

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