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Dept. of Energy catches up to 2020, reports Wuhan lab leak the most likely origin of COVID-19

by Jacob Fuller

Willie R. Tubbs, FISM News

It wasn’t the first time that an agency within the federal government endorsed the idea that COVID-19 could have originated in a lab. Still, Sunday’s revelation that the Department of Energy (DOE) views a lab leak as the most likely cause of the pandemic was the one that sent Republicans on quite the victory lap.

The Wall Street Journal, citing classified intelligence reports given to the White House and key members of Congress, was the first to report the Department of Energy’s stance, which was similar to findings by the FBI last year.

Importantly, the Energy Department’s intelligence experts said they had low confidence in their conclusion. On any report, intelligence analysts can rate their conclusions as low, medium, or high, with low representing a conclusion based on limited or fragmented information.

Still, per the Journal’s article, the DOE experts said COVID-19 was most likely created in a lab, in Wuhan, China, and spread by virtue of a leak.

The development is unlikely to close the divide in opinions among partisans — Sunday’s news was just enough to allow everyone to remain firmly in their foxholes — but it was an incremental step toward a place where divergent opinions are at least tolerated.

“Almost impossible to overstate how wrong so many news corporations were on the science of [COVID],” tweeted Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a scholar whose stances on the virus proved highly contentious and earned him the scorn of numerous federal health agencies.

After listing several COVID-related items he felt the media got wrong on COVID, Bhattacharya concluded, “A perfect record of anti-science failure.”

On Capitol Hill, numerous Republicans lashed out at the nation of China.

“Re. China’s lab leak, being proven right doesn’t matter,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tweeted. “What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn’t happen again.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said he would push for more openness from the federal government, his argument being that the American people should have the ability to read and decide for themselves what level of confidence should be ascribed to Energy’s sources of information.

“The American people deserve the full truth about #covid origins,” Hawley tweeted. “No more whitewash. I will again introduce legislation to make the [U.S.] government’s intelligence reports on covid open to the people.”

Other Republicans took the opportunity to blast those who labeled them anti-science, conspiracy theorists, and more.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz retweeted a post from Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler from 2020 in which Kessler said, “I fear @tedcruz missed the scientific animation in the video that shows how it is virtually impossible for this virus jump from the lab. Or the many interviews with actual scientists. We deal in facts, and viewers can judge for themselves.”

Sunday, Cruz shared a link to the Wall Street Journal article and wrote, “4 [clown face emojis] for Glenn.”

SOCIAL MEDIA CENSORSHIP

Despite widespread revelry, some conservatives focused on the fact that the lab-leak theory was one of the key statements that led to many high- and low-profile bannings on social media.

“Now that the U.S. Department of Energy has joined [the] FBI in concluding that the coronavirus likely leaked from a lab, it’s worth remembering that the media, en masse, condemned the lab leak theory as a ‘debunked conspiracy theory,’ and Facebook censored people who dared suggest it,” write Michael Shellenberger tweeted.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) replied to Shellenberger, “It’s absurd how many people were completely banned from social media platforms for saying this exact same thing. Many of them still remain banned.”

As of this writing, neither the White House nor the Department of Energy had remarked on the original Wall Street Journal report.

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