China rejected a World Health Organization (WHO) investigation into the origins of COVID-19 last week, but the facts are too damning for even the WHO to ignore, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on Monday.
“I had access to all of the U.S. government’s most sensitive intelligence related to the pandemic. My informed opinion is that the lab leak theory isn’t just a ‘possibility,’ at the very least it is more like a probability, if not very close to a certainty,” he wrote in a Fox News op-ed. “More than 18 months after the virus first leaked into the world, I still have not seen a single shred of scientific evidence or intelligence that the virus outbreak was a naturally occurring ‘spillover’ that jumped from an animal to a human.”
Ratcliffe was director of national intelligence during the pandemic from 2020-2021 and said every piece of evidence he’s seen since then points to the pandemic’s origin being a leak out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), he alleged, did everything they could to hide “smoking gun” evidence and dispel the lab-leak theory.
“Nothing undermines China’s ambitions as an emerging global superpower more than being culpable for the deaths of millions of people around the world,” he said.
In January, Ratcliffe and then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released a fact sheet drawing on classified intelligence, stating that “several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and seasonal illnesses.” Ratcliffe said he hoped the sheet would jumpstart an effort to hold China accountable, but “in light of their continued rejection of transparency and accountability, the Biden administration must now go further and declassify and publicly release additional intelligence because it is vital to the national and global interest.”
Months ago, the lab leak was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory, with the corporate media pushing countless articles claiming the lab-leak theory was false or had been “debunked.” Now Ratcliffe is urging the United States to share all information about the alleged WIV lab leak with the public. From there, he said, the International Olympic Committee should deny the CCP the ability to host the 2022 games.
As of now, Beijing will host the 2022 Olympic Games. But the CCP’s long commitment to disinformation and criminal coverups is reason enough to move the games, Ratcliffe argued.
“The seven Olympic values are friendship, excellence, respect, courage, determination, inspiration and equality,” he said. “The CCP’s coverup of the virus’s origins have proven once again that they are no friend of the world.”
