 "Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) during the Feb. 3 visit of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the SARS-CoV-2, the virus that triggered the Covid-19 pandemic. (Photo: AFP)")
In 2020, Germany’s federal intelligence agency BND had assessed that the possibility of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 disease, originating in a Chinese laboratory was 80-95 per cent, according to a report.
The findings of the BND have been reported at a time when the world is observing the five-year mark of the Covid-19 pandemic. In late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 emerged in China’s Wuhan city that spread to the rest of the world. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic.
German media outlets Zeit and Suddeutsche Zeitung have reported that the BND had assessed early in the pandemic on the basis of classified intelligence that Covid-19 originated in a laboratory. However, the outlets said that the findings of the BND were neither made public nor shared with Western allies.
Two subsequent governments of Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz blocked the release of BND’s findings, according to the report.
For much of 2020, the idea of Covid-19 originating from a lab was dubbed by most of the governments as well as scientists and media organisations a conspiracy theory. The working assumption was that Covid-19 emerged naturally in Wuhan and jumped into humans from an animal, most likely a bat. However, in the five years since the first outbreak in Wuhan, no evidence has emerged of natural origin, but a pile of circumstantial evidence has made a strong case of lab-origin .
How German intelligence indicted China for Covid-19 origin
In the first weeks of 2020, as the Covid-19 was spreading in the world, BND launched an operation codenamed Project Saaremaa to uncover the origin of the virus causing the disease, according to the investigation by German newspapers Zeit and Suddeutsche Zeitung.
German intelligence personnel specialising in stealing secrets were part of the project, as per the report.
They targeted Chinese government agencies and scientific institutes, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and found unpublished data, internal papers by Chinese researchers, unpublished dissertations from 2019 and 2020, among other information that led them to assess with such a high confidence that Covid-19 originated in a Chinese lab, as per the report.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsA key factor that helped with the conclusion was that “an unusually large amount of knowledge about the supposedly novel virus was available at an unusually early stage” with China that suggested that the virus had been around for much longer than known, according to the English translation of the report.
The outlets reported that the BND found a series of measurements of data dealing with coronaviruses, information on animal experiments, many scientific studies, including unpublished dissertations from 2019 and 2020 that were supposedly concerned with the effect of coronaviruses on the human brain.
BND’s findings were blocked: Report
Zeit and Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that two successive German governments, firstly of Angela Merkel and then Olaf Scholz, put the findings of BND under lock and key.
They reported that these governments neither made the findings public nor shared with Western partners like the United States.
It was only in December 2024 that Germany shared the BND’s findings with the United States for the first time, according to the report.
In early 2021, after many media investigations and whistleblower revelations, then-US President Joe Biden ordered a review of intelligence regarding Covid-origin. While the US intelligence community did not report any consensus around origin, one agency said it believed in lab-origin and most of the others refused to rule it out. By the end of Biden’s term, three US agencies, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Energy, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had concluded that Covid-19 most likely originated in a lab in China.
It has emerged in media investigations that Chinese scientists at WIV, in partnership with US scientists, had proposed to develope exactly the same kind of virus that emerged in Wuhan more than a year ago in the name of research in a proposal submitted to US government. The proposal was rejected. The emergence of exactly the same kind of virus in Wuhan later has been seen by many as a ‘smoking gun’ evidence of Covid-19 originating in a Chinese lab.
In addition to creating the virus, the Chinese regime has also been indicted for turning it into a global pandemic by lying to the world about the outbreak and its nature and letting it spread. For weeks, Chinese regime did not share with the world virus’ genome and the fact that it was transmissible.
In any other open country, such as the United States, the authorities would have taken the logical steps of alerting the world and sharing the genome at once and the novel coronavirus outbreak would have been little more than a kitchen fire, said Jamie Metzl, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a specialist on China who has previously served at the US Department of State and White House.
“The Chinese government turned the equivalent of a stove fire into a kitchen fire, the kitchen fire into a city fire, and the city fire into ultimately a global inferno. In the critical first days and weeks, the Chinese government did everything wrong and everything possible for political purposes to prevent the kind of response that was so urgently needed. If not for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there almost certainly would not have been a pandemic,” Metzl told Firstpost previously.