'Potential lab incident': FBI director Wray speaks publicly for 1st time on COVID-19 origin The FBI

[womanofthehills]

'Potential lab incident': FBI director Wray speaks publicly for 1st time on COVID-19 origin
The FBI has assessed the virus "most likely" came from a Chinese lab leak.

FBI director Christopher Wray on Tuesday spoke publicly for the first time on the bureau's assessment that the COVID-19 virus "most likely" originated from a potential lab incident in Wuhan, China.https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/potential-lab-incident-fbi-director-wray-speaks-publicly/story?id=97535563

[patphil]

1. It may be true, but I have a hard time believing anything a Trump appointee says.

[DURHAM D]

2. He is totally owned by Trump.

Not interested in anything he has to say because it is not based on fact.
He has yet to order an investigation of the FBI failures of January 6.

[former9thward]

7. What investigations of the matter are based on "facts" as you define them?

[MichMan]

28. The Dept of Energy is saying the same thing

Do you believe Sec. Jennifer Granholm is also a Trump loyalist ?

[patphil]

29. She's a Democrat, appointed by President Biden, and she has a long history as a Democrat.

What makes you say she's a Trump loyalist?

[MichMan]

30. I don't, but you said you don't believe anything Wray said because he is a Trump loyalist

The Dept of Energy under Sec Granholm said the same thing, so to believe one is lying and the other isn't makes zero sense.

[patphil]

32. Wray already had a shakey history as FBI director.

I think Senator Granholm's opinion is wrong, but not based on an attempt to deliberately muddy the waters concerning the origin of Covid-19.
On the other hand, I don't trust Wray.
Anyway, best to follow the information put out by those who have a background in these kind of things.
See reply 13.

[DURHAM D]

3. Who asked him?

Shutup chriissie

[BootinUp]

4. Most likely my ass. nt

[former9thward]

5. What did your investigation find?

[BootinUp]

6. That top scientists in the field disagree with the FBI

[former9thward]

8. Who?

You mean the "top scientists in the field" according to you.

[BootinUp]

13. This will be brief, because I don't feel like wasting my time.

Most scientists believe the virus spilled into human populations through natural zoonosis, similar to the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV outbreaks, and consistent with other pandemics in human history.[374][375] Available evidence suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was originally harbored by bats, and spread to humans multiple times from infected wild animals at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan in December 2019.[374][375] A minority of scientists and some members of the U.S intelligence community believe the virus may have been unintentionally leaked from a laboratory such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[376][377] The US intelligence community has mixed views on the issue,[378][379] but overall agrees with the scientific consensus that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon and is unlikely to have been genetically engineered.[380][381][382][383] There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 existed in any laboratory prior to the pandemic.[384][385][386]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19


But at the end of the day, the origin of the pandemic is also a scientific question. Virologists who study pandemic origins are much less divided than the U.S. intelligence community. They say there is "very convincing" data and "overwhelming evidence" pointing to an animal origin.

In particular, scientists published two extensive, peer-reviewed papers in Science in July 2022, offering the strongest evidence to date that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in animals at a market in Wuhan, China. Specifically, they conclude that the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.

Virologist Angela Rasmussen, who contributed to one of the Science papers, says the DOE's "low confident" conclusion doesn't "negate the affirmative evidence for zoonotic [or animal] origin nor do they add any new information in support of lab origin."

"Many other [news] outlets are presenting this as new conclusive proof that the lab origin hypothesis is equally as plausible as the zoonotic origin hypothesis," Rasmussen wrote in an email to NPR, "and that is a misrepresentation of the evidence for either."

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/28/1160162845/what-does-the-science-say-about-the-origin-of-the-sars-cov-2-pandemic

[former9thward]

15. You were not brief even though you promised.

But I will be. The Chinese have lied about this virus since the very beginning. Governments lie for a reason. The Chinese have refused to cooperate with any outside investigation of the origins of the virus. Governments refuse to cooperate for a reason. If the transmission was zoonotic the Chinese would have nothing to hide. They do.

[BootinUp]

18. A conspiracy theory with no evidence. Just what

I feared. And from that you conclude that 'Most Likely' is a reasonable characterization? You are making me laugh.

[Phoenix61]

25. The Chinese do t have to do anything they don't want to do.

They are under no obligation to share anything with us. Their refusal to do so indicates nothing other than the fact they are a closed society who do not see us as a friend.

[former9thward]

34. They have refused to cooperate with ANY investigation with any other country.

This has nothing to do with just the U.S. Covid went worldwide. And you are right -- they don't have to. But we don't have to cover for them and make silly unscientific excuses for their behavior.

[Phoenix61]

35. Nor should we make silly unscientific conclusions from their behavior.

China isn’t an open country.

[PSPS]

24. Viral genealogists are the experts in this and they agree this is not a lab creation.

Of course, "anything is possible." Maybe it wafted in Earth's orbit from that duplicate Earth we never see because it's on the opposite side of the Sun.

[Phoenix61]

36. + 1,000. nt

[Hope22]

9. The shit has hit the fan for the FBI today.

This Covid stuff is simply a distraction! These dirty dogs are not to be believed.

[EleanorR]

11. He gave an exclusive interview with fox media, right after it was proven they are liars

He should have been fired a long time ago.

[Phoenix61]

26. Because Fox is such an unbiased news agency.

Personally, I don’t trust Wray as far as I could throw him. If he wants to give an interview how about explaining this:
“McGonigal, who was the special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the FBI's New York field office until 2018.”
And how he failed to know anything about it.

[RockRaven]

12. Wray has a BA in philosophy and a JD... How much of the science does he personally understand?

Who exactly is making this assessment within the FBI and what are their education/training/experience? We won't be told.

The FBI is a black box AND we are not allowed to know what all of their data inputs are (national security secrets!).

So we are expected to just trust them. Yeah.... about that... based on their history, that will be a hard pass.

The virus very well may have originated from the lab, but there is fuck-all reason to conclude so because the goddamned FBI says so.

[Mad_Machine76]

14. Does anybody actually have a working theory

About what actually led to a lab leak? Or what the lab incident was that spread it?

[former9thward]

16. What you are asking is impossible.

The Chinese have refused any access to the Wuhan lab since this started. They have refused to cooperate with any international investigation. What is the reason for this? I don't think you need to be an FBI agent to know the answer.

[Phoenix61]

27. No I dont. I now the Chinese are under no obligation to

do anything they don’t want to do. Reading nefarious motives into that is the stuff of conspiracy theories.

[Mad_Machine76]

37. There could be a multitude of reasons why

It isn't necessarily an admission of guilt/responsibility JMHO.

[WarGamer]

17. Were US personnel onsite when the leak occured?

Was it the US funded lab? Were they performing gain of function research there?

Lots of questions.

[womanofthehills]

20. At least a year or two before, the US was warned that the conditions at the lab were worrisome

Gain of function research needs to be done in a Bio 4 lab and they were doing it in a bio 2 (a very unsafe lab).

Our top coronavirus scientist, Ralph Barik of the Univ of NC bio lab and the Chinese top coronavirus specialist Shi Zhengli & others wrote 5 papers together. Here is one from 2015 -

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/

Abstract

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.

[roamer65]

21. My gut tells me that a lab employee was selling lab animals into the wet market in Wuhan.

Just a hunch.

That’s how you could get a lab breach and a zoonotic transfer all in one.

[NBachers]

22. I've heard the same conjecture.

[roamer65]

23. We will never truly know.

But it sure smells like it to me.

[Historic NY]

19. The first patient was not connected to the lab.

On January 16, 2020, a 57-year-old woman came to the emergency department of the First Hospital of Changsha City, China. After 10?min, she was taken into the examination room and evaluated by the emergency physician. The chief complaints of this patient were cough and fever, with general weakness and muscle aches that developed after returning to Changsha from Wuhan 7 days prior. Given her symptoms and recent travel history, she decided to see a health care provider.

. Given the patient’s travel history and CT findings, Hunan Province and Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) were immediately notified. CCDC staff required us to test the patient for COVID-19, even though the patient disclosed that she had never been to the Huanan seafood market and reported no known contact with ill persons in the past month



[link:https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-020-05545-y|]

[Sympthsical]

33. That woman is nowhere near the first patient

Cases had begun in 2019. The first real signs of a problem - when China alerted the WHO - was in December. Which means the virus was floating around before then given incubation periods. When research traced back, given how epidemiology estimates infections reaching critical mass, the thinking is the infections began spreading in early to mid-November.

Guess who was having a biosecurity emergency in early to mid-November?

People also keep leaving out that Covid is often asymptomatic. I think when people are thinking about these things, they think it's like a Hollywood movie. Where someone gets it and starts bleeding out of their assholes or something. It's very, very plausible that early transmission was largely asymptomatic. Plenty of people no doubt contracted and spread it well before hospitals started being alert to a problem developing.

There's a really interesting ProPublica/Vanity Fair article about it from a few months back. Not a right-wing source by any stretch of the imagination for those team monitors out there keeping watch. The interpreter being cited, Toy Reid, began working at the State Department in 2010. (It's dumb I have to put these disclaimers on things now, but some people only care about which side people are on).

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab

It's a fascinating article on many levels. I particularly enjoyed reading how the interpreter tried to piece things together. There's a lot of room for different interpretations, but it's serious work worth considering.

[we can do it]

31. This is to divert attention from FBI report revealing agents were 'afraid' to raid Mar-a-Lago.

Washington Post exclusive report reveals some FBI agents were “afraid” to raid Mar-a-Lago and some wanted to simply shut down the criminal investigation, delaying for months the retrieval of classified documents that Donald Trump had unlawfully retained and refusal to return.

“Months of disputes between Justice Department prosecutors and FBI agents over how best to try to recover classified documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club and residence led to a tense showdown near the end of July last year,” The Post reports.

“Prosecutors ultimately prevailed in that dispute,” and the “FBI conducted an unprecedented raid on Aug. 8, recovering more than 100 classified items, among them a document describing a foreign government’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.”

Two senior FBI officials wanted to ask Trump’s permission to go to Mar-a-Lago to search the ex-president’s resort and residence, despite having video evidence that appeared to show a trove of presidential documents being moved from a storage room after Trump was directed to return the items, including classified documents, that had been taken from the White House.