According to two German newspapers, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has since 2020 considered the Wuhan lab leak theory of the coronavirus’s origins as 80-95% likely. The reports emerged from the Zeit and Süd Deutsche newspapers on Wednesday.
The lab leak theory centres on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is located in the city where COVID contagion began. Germany’s BND is said to have documented reports of numerous violations of laboratory safety at the Wuhan institute.
The story has led to a scandal in Germany over the alleged cover-up of the findings of the commissioned investigation. Former chancellors Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz are believed to have been aware of the findings.
Wolfgang Kubicki of the Free Democratic Party said, “The federal government has demonstrably left the German public and parliament in the dark.” Angela Merkel has rejected accusations of a cover-up.
The Chinese government gave little away in response to the scandal in Germany. “In the issue of the coronavirus, China firmly rejects any form of political maneuvering,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning.
Ning referred to a WHO investigation that found the Wuhan lab leak theory “highly unlikely”. Others have said this investigation was only preliminary.
The German intelligence reports follow those of US intelligence. In late January, the CIA was reported by The New York Times to have concluded, “with low confidence”, that the coronavirus is most likely to have emerged from the Wuhan lab.
That news followed two days after the confirmation of China hawk John Ratcliffe as the Trump administration’s CIA director. Ratcliffe, who was the US Director of National Intelligence in 2020, said, the “Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership coordinated – and continues to perpetrate – a massive cover up of the virus’s origins and the circumstances surrounding its initial outbreak.”
If the BND and CIA analyses are accurate, a warning sign should have been the rapidity with which China was able to release a full gene sequence of the coronavirus, something myself and other observers praised them for. The sequence was released to the world on 11 January 2020 and enabled the unprecedentedly quick development of the anti-COVID vaccines.
Article image courtesy of @octoneyuan via Unsplash.
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