A recent report makes the bombshell case that America’s intelligence community had evidence of a COVID-19 laboratory leak at a time when Americans were censored for supporting that view.
Retired senior FBI scientist Jason Bannan was one of the federal employees in 2021 who had “moderate confidence” that the new virus came from a Chinese laboratory, according to The Wall Street Journal. Still, only federal employees who went with the “animal to human” theory with “low confidence” got to brief President Joe Biden at a major meeting dated Aug. 24, 2021. Consequently, the Biden administration pressured social media companies to censor COVID-19-related speech that was supposedly “disinformation,” including the lab leak theory.
The Journal reported that National Intelligence Director Avril Haines’s office has tried to justify not inviting the FBI experts to the August meeting with Biden claiming the lab theory was properly represented. Despite Haines’s dubious reassurances, Bannan said it was “surprising” he was not invited to the meeting.
“Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing,” Bannan told The Journal in his first public interview since retiring in 2022. “I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask.”
But the cover-up extended much deeper than not having Bannan at the meeting. For instance, at least three military scientists—working at the National Center for Medical Intelligence of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency—found evidence that the COVID-19 virus was manipulated in a laboratory, but this opinion was not shared with Biden because the Defense Intelligence Agency had a different opinion.
When the three Pentagon scientists at the National Center for Medical Intelligence found evidence that COVID-19 was manipulated in a lab through gain-of-function research, they were ordered not to continue sharing information with their FBI counterparts, according to The Journal.
As of February 2022, MRC documented over 800 cases of COVID-19 censorship utilizing its unique CensorTrack database online, including some related to the lab leak theory. That censorship has since been revealed as occurring after government pressure.
The argument over COVID-19‘s origins divided both government and scientific authorities throughout 2020 and 2021, The Journal noted. Bannan started researching the virus in early 2020 under the Trump presidency. The FBI supported the laboratory leak theory, the outlet claimed, yet that was not apparently taken into account in broader government policy. FBI experts warred internally with other agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was accused in the Facebook Files of pressuring Facebook to censor COVID-19 debates online.
A 2024 letter from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and the landmark Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit revealed that the federal government, particularly under Biden, directly pressured social media companies to censor opinions on COVID-19 (even satire) that were not in line with official government policies. Podcast host Tucker Carlson, journalist Texas Lindsay and the MIT Technology Review were among the individuals and entities censored for discussing the COVID-19 lab leak theory, as seen in CensorTrack.
Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
