The American media is doing its best to ignore the biggest news this week.
As Alex Berenson notes, while every legacy media outlet is reminding you it’s been exactly five years since the Little Epidemic That Could started its long chug into your lungs, or at least your upper respiratory tract, two big German newspapers – Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung -broke some actual news.
Turns out, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has long had evidence that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a lab in Wuhan, China.
It was kept classified, however.
As Remix News reports, according to these reports, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe in 2020, the German government commissioned a secret intelligence operation under the codename of Saaremaa to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2.
As part of this investigation, the BND analyzed scientific data from a number of Chinese research laboratories, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The BND noted that the Chinese labs had conducted “gain-of-function” virology experiments, whereby mutations are deliberately induced in naturally occurring viruses in order to enhance their existing qualities, such as transmissibility and potency. Such experiments are considered highly dangerous.
The BND also observed that these facilities demonstrated numerous violations of routine laboratory safety regulations.
When the BND submitted their report, their conclusion was that there was an 80 to 95 percent probability that Covid had originated in a Chinese lab and was then leaked accidentally.
Upon the report’s completion in 2020, Bruno Kahl, who has been the BND’s president since 2016, personally briefed then-Chancellor Angela Merkel on its findings.
BREAKING: Ursula von der Leyen’s European Commission did not allow the public enough access to Covid-19 vaccine contracts it secured with Big Pharma during the pandemic, the EU’s top court has ruled.
The ruling criticizing the Commission’s lack of transparency comes just one day… pic.twitter.com/alTtwviBCA
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) July 17, 2024
The German Chancellery ordered that these results were to be kept hidden from the public, however.
Several politicians who were in office at the time that the report was drawn up, including former Minister of the Chancellery Helge Braun, former State Secretary for Intelligence Johannes Geismann, and Angela Merkel herself were contacted by reporters and asked to comment. All of them refused to answer.
The trail doesn’t end there, however. Shortly after Olaf Scholz took over from Angela Merkel in December 2021, Kahl again briefed the chancellor on the report’s findings. It was still kept secret.
Covid lockdowns based on politics, not science, leaked messages from UK government reveal. https://t.co/EaRuyEYT5t
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) March 9, 2023
Not even the Bundestag’s parliamentary oversight committee, which oversees the intelligence services, or the World Health Organization were informed of the report’s existence or its conclusions.
The BND decided to share its findings with the American Central Intelligence Agency last autumn, however.
This is perhaps why: When John Ratcliffe was appointed director of the CIA after President Donald Trump took office in January, the CIA’s official position on the possibility that Covid-19 had originated in a laboratory was revised from “undecided” to “low confidence.”
The German government itself revisited the issue in December 2024 and ordered a new team of experts to reevaluate the report’s conclusions, which is ongoing. This team includes Lars Schade, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, which conducts research into public health, as well as the virologist Christian Drosten, who became a public expert on Covid-19 during the pandemic.
Notably, during the early months of the pandemic, Schade dismissed suggestions that Covid-19 may have originated in a laboratory as “conspiracy theories.” By 2022, however, he admitted that virologists in Wuhan had “done things that could be described as dangerous,” even though he still said that he regarded the laboratory thesis as unlikely.
The German government has so far declined to comment on the ongoing project.
Determining Covid-19’s origins with certainty is difficult, however, given that the Chinese government has consistently blocked the WHO’s efforts to investigate it.
German MP and Vice President of the Bundestag Wolfgang Kubicki has expressed outrage at the fact that the report’s findings were kept secret for so long.
“The federal government has demonstrably left the German public as well as the Bundestag in the dark,” he said to the Tagesspiegel newspaper.
Kubicki also called for the resignation of current Minister of Health Karl Lauterbach, saying that he “and his colleagues have done much to undermine trust in the integrity of government.”
On X, Kubicki referred to both the report’s findings and the cover-up as “extremely worrying,” and demanded that the German state apologize and also summon the Chinese ambassador for an explanation.
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