COVID Wuhan lab leak 'only' explanation: John Ratcliffe

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Tuesday the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China is the “only” credible explanation for the pandemic that has claimed millions of lives around the world.

“My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government’s intelligence … has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense,” Ratcliffe told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

“If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming — while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous,” added Ratcliffe, a former Texas Republican congressman who served as former President Donald Trump’s second and last director of national intelligence.

Since leaving government in 2021, Ratcliffe has repeatedly accused China’s ruling Communist Party of orchestrating a “massive cover-up” of its role in the pandemic.

That effort is ongoing, he said Tuesday, as the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC formally objected to the subcommittee hearing and officials in China have gone to “great lengths” to obscure the truth.

The CCP’s tactics have ranged “from destroying medical tests, samples and data to intimidating and disappearing witnesses and journalists to lying and coercing global health authorities even spreading propaganda,” according to Ratcliffe.

Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) vowed during the hearing that Beijing’s “intimidation tactics” would not stop the work of COVID oversight — and pledged to send a letter to the Chinese Ambassador to the US requesting further cooperation.

A report released Monday by the office of Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) similarly accused the Chinese government of a “cover-up” and indicated the pandemic may have started with two separate lab leaks engaged in risky “gain of function” research.

Ratcliffe said Tuedsay that he and other Trump administration officials faced several “challenges” to relaying information about the lab leak theory to the public, including “legitimate concerns about our closely held sources and methods of intelligence, as well as illegitimate roadblocks that related to professional conflicts of interest and partisan politics.”

The former administration also faced “headwinds” form “conflicted scientists” and “mainstream press” who labeled talk about the lab leak a “conspiracy theory,” while at the same time it was “censored as disinformation by social media giants,” according to Ratcliffe.

The former DNI also revealed that he never discussed COVID origins with Dr. Anthony Fauci — even as the White House chief medical adviser and others were “promoting the idea that this was natural origins” while referring to the lab leak “publicly as a conspiracy theory.”

Another witness, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Feith, echoed Ratcliffe’s assessment.

“Many of the most influential US government and academic authorities on virology were coordinating to, as John said, disprove any type of lab theory,” Feith said.

“These officials and scientists knew that COVID may have come from a lab; they knew that a lab leak could have resulted from research in Wuhan funded by the US government; and they knew that if such research were in fact part of COVID’s origin, they could face professional and personal embarrassment,” he added.

“So these officials and scientists evidently collaborated to convince the government not to investigate the origins of COVID.”

Ratcliffe also accused the CIA of failing to fully investigate pandemic.

“To this day, the CIA, unquestionably the world’s premier spy agency with an unrivaled capacity to acquire information, has continued to state that it does not have enough information to make any formal assessment,” he said.

“To put it bluntly, this is unjustifiable—and a reflection not that the agency can’t make an assessment with any confidence, but that it won’t.”

The reason, Ratcliffe claimed, is that the Biden administration does not want to “face head-on” the “enormous implications” of such an assessment — though President Biden signed a bill last month to declassify intelligence about the origins of COVID-19.

“Some three-and-a-half years later, the only plausible assessment the agency could make with any level of confidence is that a virus which killed over a million Americans originated in a Chinese lab whose research included work for the Chinese military,” he told lawmakers.

“And such an assessment would have enormous implications that I believe the current administration does not want to face head-on.”

Biden initially favored a World Health Organization assessment of the origins of COVID-19 before ordering US intelligence agencies in May 2021 to conduct their own assessment.

Three months later, US spy agencies reported that theories that the coronavirus came from a lab or animal-to-human transmission were both “plausible.”

Subcommittee Ranking Member Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) in his prepared remarks praised the Biden administration for using “every tool at its disposal” to make the assessment.

“And thanks to this action we are making progress every day in advancing our understanding of the pandemic’s origins, despite continued obstruction from the Chinese Communist Party.”

The US Energy Department concluded in February that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory — more than a year after the FBI made a similar assessment.

Ratcliffe’s testimony comes weeks after former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told the subcommittee that the truth of pandemic origins could only come from the intelligence community.

Far-right GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) contrasted the intelligence community’s delay in identifying the cause of the pandemic with its alacrity in apprehending an Air National Guardsman who allegedly leaked a trove of highly sensitive US documents on an online gaming platform earlier this year.

“The intelligence community is able to figure out immediately who was leaking classified information in a Discord chat, but yet still doesn’t want to say whether it came from the lab or didn’t come from the lab,” she said.

Former Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Analysis and Production Dr. Mark Lowenthal, who was invited to the hearing by Democrats, pushed back strongly against Greene’s comparison.

“You will never be sure with the Chinese whether they have given you the access that you want,” he explained. “There is a vast, vast difference between tracking a leak on a social media site and determining the origins of this disease. And to compare the two is entirely fallacious.”