by WorldTribune Staff, November 13, 2025 Real World News
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) dismissed information pointing to a lab accident at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of Covid, referring to the intelligence as “misinformation” even though it came from the ODNI’s own advisor on bioengineering, a report said.
University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan lab, advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released on Oct. 30 by Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul.
“The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of Covid than they told the public,” Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter Emily Kopp noted in a Nov. 11 report.
The documents released by Paul show that Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that Covid may have emerged from a lab. Baric shared that the Wuhan lab had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics.
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab experiments with viruses under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in Covid while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the Daily Caller. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the NCBC in August following questions about its role in suppressing Covid origins intelligence.
“In the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of Covid’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission,” the Daily Caller reported.
Kopp noted: “Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.”
Current CIA Director John Ratcliffe “has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the Covid-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Meanwhile, Paul said he is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
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