Only willful blindness would prevent anybody from at least suspecting that the COVID virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And by suspecting, I mean believing that the virus’ emergence into the human population likely resulted from a lab leak. Unless the Chinese admit that this is the case we may never have definitive proof, but other scenarios strain credulity.

So it is no surprise that yet another government agency has concluded that COVID likely originated in a lab. This time it is the Department of Energy, which has surprising resources directly related to making such a judgment.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office.

The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. 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.

The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.

The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.

Don’t ask me why the Department of Energy has expertise in this area. I think the answer is “government.” Presumably, their biological expertise arose from their work with radioactive elements and mission creep. Whatever the case, the why of such expertise matters less than the “what” they have concluded.

I certainly trust them more than the CDC, if for no other reason than the CDC probably had an indirect hand in the lab leak.

The relative level of confidence matters, but probably less than you would think. Such rankings have as much to do with how actionable the intelligence is as how confident they actually feel about the conclusion. One can be pretty sure that something happened while not being confident enough to accuse directly. “Yeah, I think it happened this way, but I can’t definitively prove it.”

The FBI had already reached a similar conclusion, by the way.

The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.

U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.

The updated document underscores how intelligence officials are still putting together the pieces on how Covid-19 emerged. More than one million Americans have died in the pandemic that began more than three years ago.

The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with “low confidence” that the virus came about through natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the updated report.

Whichever version of events you think is more likely is less relevant to how the debate about the origin has played out in the United States. Whether the emergence of COVID is the result of a freak natural escape into the human population from a bat at a wet market or from the research of the “bat lady” at WIV, the government’s deceptions and suppression of debate are in many ways of greater importance.

COVID burned through the US. Whatever the origin over a million people died. US foreign policy would likely not change much unless the virus’ development stemmed from a biological weapons program; if it was an accident or natural transmission our policies toward China will likely be determined by other considerations.

But government policies and the enforcement of a narrative in the US have a direct impact on everybody’s lives right here, right now. And the suppression of debate, despite the obvious possibility (I would argue likelihood) of a lab leak is what matters the most in the short term.

That suppression was nothing short of tyrannical. Citizens were censored for speculation that the virus came from a lab, despite serious scientists believing that thesis, intelligence agencies considering or even concluding that this was so, and even the President of the United States (in 2020) openly speculating on this possibility.

The suppression itself was tyrannical, and the reasons for it were venal: the bureaucrats, particularly Anthony Fauci, didn’t want the discussion to happen.

And they didn’t want it to happen because they were funding the WIV, and wanted to assert that they had totally clean hands. If the virus did leak from the WIV, Anthony Fauci and his agency would be partially responsible.

Fauci, more than any other person was responsible for the US response to COVID, and if indeed as seems likely the virus escaped from the WIV, he was also responsible for its arrival on our shores and hence the death of over a million Americans.

Is it any wonder he would want to suppress that knowledge?

We still don’t know where the virus came from. WSJ says DOE “made its judg­ment with ‘low con­fidence.’” Four other agencies say it had natural origins and two are undecided

But that was the case in 2020 when journalists and Facebook pretended they knewhttps://t.co/aYChSMDgCY

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 26, 2023

The fact of a coverup is not, in itself, surprising. People try to cover up their mistakes all the time. It is the cooperation of almost every level of government and especially the MSM in the effort that is so disturbing. In a functioning society, the press would be eager to expose the coverup, to get those coveted investigative reporter kudos and a Pulitzer Prize.

But Pulitzers are now given for reporting misinformation that benefits the elites, not for informing the public of uncomfortable truths. Witness the shared Pulitzer of the WaPo and NYT for their coverage of Russiagate, which was totally bogus.

Fauci, at least, you can understand. Who wants to be known as one of the biggest mass murderers in human history, even if accidentally? I’d try to cover that up if I could! It’s not a small “oops.”

It’s also clear that the low level of public trust in the media is well-founded. Journalists behaved like activists. They blindly trusted activist-scientists, went far beyond what the evidence showed, and morally condemned anyone who even suggested we consider the alternative… https://t.co/GuGC9z8bdN

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 26, 2023

But why the cooperation? Why censorship? Why the deceptions at every level?

It is, I believe, a result of the conceit of the elite that anything which undermines faith in the credentialed class is such a bad thing that almost anything is justified in preventing this from happening.

The fall of Anthony Fauci would be yet another chink in the armor the Elite use to protect their power. Better to promote a lie than admit that “experts,” whose expertise underlies the justification of elite power, are not omniscient. If “the Science™” can be wrong or even destructive, what reason do we have to give near absolute power to the current crop of leaders?

So everybody pretended to believe something that was likely not true? They suppressed dissent from others; they censored public discussion; and they de-platformed the insistent.

Not especially to protect Fauci, although they wanted to do that too, but to protect their own near absolute power.

Is it possible that the virus escaped into the human population from the wet market?

Sure. But that required more coincidences than the more obvious release from a poorly protected lab, as we know WIV to have been. They have never identified a reservoir of the virus in nature, which is very unusual. All the likely candidates come from hundreds of miles away–a region regularly visited by the “bat lady;” and the US government-funded gain-of-function research on bat viruses at the WIV.

Seems a simpler explanation by a mile than some bat hunter traveling hundreds of miles to capture a bat, bring it to Wuhan, and for it to jump species. And nobody, even today, is able to find the particular bat species the virus arose from.

The lab leak theory was never outlandish. Scientists in 2015 openly worried one would create a pandemic

“An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus … has triggered debate over whether engineering viruses with pandemic potential is worth the risks” pic.twitter.com/5Q9TxyFwLG

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) February 26, 2023

It took a weekend for a scientist to conclude that the virus was engineered. Then the man whose power determined his career path hastily worked hard to change his conclusion. The coverup began in early 2020, and won’t completely unravel until Joe Biden is gone from the scene.

The chinks in the armor are multiplying, but the incentive to maintain the fiction is still there. Until that is gone most powerful people will pretend that this was Gaia’s revenge on man for offending her.

UPDATE:

The Twitter account “Comfortably Smug” has an epic thread tearing into all the attacks on those of us who argued that the lab leak theory was plausible or even likely.

In a now-retracted fact-check, Politifact gave a Tucker Carlson guest a “Pants on Fire” for the “debunked conspiracy theory” that COVID came from a lab. https://t.co/4uoawOKTtl pic.twitter.com/pV1Tjm2yFW

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) February 26, 2023

Facebook banned any mentions of the lab leak, following “consultations with leading health organizations, including the World Health Organization.”https://t.co/Cppr8IuoE7 pic.twitter.com/ZDTQQYWRGe

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) February 26, 2023

Amazingly, this tweet from Vox is still up. pic.twitter.com/LKePGKjoAw

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) February 26, 2023