REPORT: UK Government Officials Privately Agree COVID-19 Pandemic Caused by Wuhan Lab Leak

Even though British intelligence and other world governments once dismissed the idea that the COVID-19 global pandemic occurred due to a lab leak in Wuhan, China, the theory has been accepted as "likely" by officials in the United Kingdom's government, according to a new report. 

Sources have told The Telegraph that the government's privately official view is the COVID-19 virus did escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but officials refrain from discussing it publicly. 

"I think the official view (within the government) is that it is as likely as anything else to have caused the pandemic. A lot of people like myself think it is more likely. I think attitudes have changed a little bit. The zoonotic transfer theory (the transmission of a disease from an animal host to a human) just didn't make sense," Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a biological counter-terrorism expert and former British Army officer told the newspaper. 

"There is a huge amount of concern about coming out publicly, but behind closed doors, most people think it's a lab leak," he continued. "And they are coming round to the fact that even if they don't agree with that, they must accept it's likely, and they must make sure the policies are in place to stop it."

As CBN News reported last June, British intelligence services said the theory of a lab leak was "feasible." One British intelligence officer told The London Times, "There might be pockets of evidence that take us one way, and evidence that takes us another way. The Chinese will lie either way. I don't think we will ever know." 

But evidence supporting the lab leak theory, once considered an improbable conspiracy theory, continues to trickle out. 

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Last December, MIT and Harvard scientist Dr. Alina Chan told members of the UK Parliament that it is 'reasonable' to believe that COVID was genetically engineered in China, and the Chinese Communist Party's cover-up of the initial outbreak in Wuhan two years ago and its attempts to sabotage the World Health Organization's inquiry into the origins of the pandemic made the lab-leak theory likely, according to The Daily Mail. 

However, in May of 2021, 18 scientists including leaders in virology and so-called evolutionary biology, signed a letter published in Science that called for a more balanced appraisal of the "laboratory incident" hypothesis.

But other researchers continue to point to the fact that even after two years of study, scientists have still not found an animal host to support China's unfounded claim of a natural origin for the COVID virus. 

President Joe Biden ordered the U.S. intelligence community to take a closer look at the origins of COVID-19 in May of 2021, calling on investigators to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion and report back to him in 90 days.  

Meanwhile, a medical doctor and a former scientist went on the record in June saying "the COVID-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that had never been observed in a natural coronavirus."

When the now-unclassified two-page report from the office of the director of National Intelligence was released last August, it revealed no smoking gun. The intelligence community believed there were two hypotheses that were plausible in the origin of COVID-19: "natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident."

The report also noted the Chinese government's lack of cooperation in the investigation into the source of the virus. 

"China's cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of COVID-19. Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the United States. These actions reflect, in part, China's government's own uncertainty about where an investigation could lead as well as its frustration the international community is using the issue to exert political pressure on China," the report concluded. 

As CBN News reported in October, the U.S. National Institutes of Health tried to defend its support for research that used bat viruses, claiming that its controversial experiments couldn't have caused the COVID-19 virus. 

The NIH said in a statement, "The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic has not been identified, despite intensive efforts to do so. This is not unusual — confirming with 100% certainty the origin of a virus is a long and complicated process."

"Analysis of published genomic data and other documents from the grantee demonstrate that the naturally occurring bat coronaviruses studied under the NIH grant are genetically far distant from SARS-CoV-2 and could not possibly have caused the COVID-19 pandemic. Any claims to the contrary are demonstrably false," the statement continued. 

Of course, the NIH can't guarantee having full knowledge of every other type of research taking place at the Wuhan lab, so its denial can only apply to the viral experimentation it was directly involved with.