An elite unit of scientists working for the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded three months after the pandemic began that COVID-19 likely was genetically manufactured and escaped a Chinese lab rather than evolving in nature as Dr. Anthony Fauci claimed, a bombshell revelation now at the heart of ongoing investigations into a possible U.S. intelligence cover-up.

“SARS-CoV-2 Spike Appears to be a Chimera,” a slide from the DIA National Center for Medical Intelligence's June 25, 2020 presentation declared, using the scientific terms for the COVID-19 virus and the “chimera’ term for a genetically engineered pathogen that is a combination of pieces from two separate viruses.

The study – using complex genome analysis – also traced the process used for creating the new virus to an earlier manuscript that the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a decade prior. "Break points align with those identified by WIV Scientists in 2008,” the presentation said.

"The molecular biology capabilities of WIV and the genome assessment are consistent with the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-engineered virus that was part of a bank of chimeric viruses … at WIV that escaped from containment," the study concluded.

You can read the full presentation here.

Report suppressed for years

The long-hidden study was only recently released under the Freedom of Information Act by U.S. intelligence agencies, a bombshell now at the center of ongoing investigations.

At least four whistleblowers have been interviewed in recent months by the Intelligence Community Inspector General’s office, the DIA’s internal watchdog and the FBI about the early findings from DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence and whether there was an effort to keep those genetic sleuths from communicating their evidence to other intelligence agencies, government officials told Just the News.

One area of focus is whether intelligence agencies sought to suppress the DIA research from a highly public release by President Joe Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Office in 2021 that assessed that COVID was “equally likely” to have come from nature or a lab accident, the officials said. That analysis – dubbed the 90-day sprint – made no overt reference to the detailed analysis DIA had offered a year earlier.

Efforts by the DIA scientists to insert their data into the 90-day document were snubbed and their edits were deleted, officials told Just the News.

Sen. Roger “Doc” Marshall, R-Kan., recently provided the intelligence community's inspector general with detailed accounts from the whistleblowers alleging the DIA research was intentionally suppressed from ODNI’s review.

“The ODNI assessment remains flawed. Witnesses claim that during the ODNI-led investigation, conflicted individuals may have censored the laboratory-origin-related intelligence and, if true, this signals an alarming breach of integrity in the investigative process,” the senator wrote in a November letter to the IG reviewed by Just the News.

You can read that letter here.

FBI probing COVID cover-ups, Fauci's phones

The intelligence community watchdog responded with a letter in January confirming receipt of the whistleblower complaints. Since then, some of the whistleblowers and other witnesses have been interviewed by the IC and DIA watchdog offices, officials said.

Separately, Just the News reported the FBI has a sprawling criminal investigation into COVID cover-ups, including one based in Cleveland that is focused on the virus' origins. Some witnesses familiar with the DIA assessment have already been in contact with agents in the case.

FBI Director Kash Patel dropped another bombshell over the weekend, confirming his agents had obtained the long-sought cellphones belonging to Fauci during the pandemic.

The emergence of the DIA research is a jarring twist in a long-running drama inside Washington as to why U.S. intelligence agencies – except for the FBI and Energy Department – were so slow to embrace evidence showing a possible lab accident/leak from dangerous gain-of-function research inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology had unleashed the deadly pandemic. The CIA only recently changed its assessment that COVID-19 had likely emanated from a lab leak.

A central piece of evidence to come into clearer public view is the presentation authored by John Hardham, a PhD microbiologist assisting the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence and a Captain in the Navy Reserve. Hardham previously served in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear and Chemical and Biological Defense Programs.

Hardham’s presentation concluded the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 — more commonly known as COVID-19 — “appears to be a chimera” that showed possible signs of laboratory manipulation. 

A chimera is defined as a “new hybrid microorganism created by joining nucleic acid fragments from two or more different microorganisms in which each of at least two of the fragments contain essential genes necessary for replication,” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Details pointed to Wuhan lab almost from beginning

Hardham and fellow researchers noted the techniques required to construct a key segment of the COVID-19 virus matched closely with prior research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — the facility long suspected as a possible source of a lab leak.

The presentation, which was first delivered to military intelligence in June 2020, showed that WIV possessed the capabilities required to insert the Receptor Binding Domain of the important “spike protein” that enables the virus to gain entry into human cells, citing its vast database of bat coronaviruses and a record of Gain of Function research on the SARS virus.

The scientist also concluded that the WIV had developed a specific “Reverse Genetics System” that could have been employed by the lab to construct clones of infectious coronaviruses by inserting gene segments for the spike protein without leaving a signature in a process that has been referred to as “No See-Em." 

Specifically, the “break points” in the COVID-19 genetic code for the spike protein align with those that were identified in a 2008 study associated with WIV. That study, cited by the scientists, as Ren, et. al was produced by researchers affiliated with the Wuhan laboratory used by WIV.

On March 8, 2021 Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote a letter to Avril Haines, Biden's Director of National Intelligence, and other officials requesting all information the agencies possessed regarding nine specific areas around the COVID-19 origin. The request should have resulted in the intelligence agency providing the DIA NCMI origin assessment. However, no such information was sent to Grassley.

Further evidence showed that DIA scientists were skeptical of early conclusions that COVID-19 had a zoonotic origin—that is spread naturally from animal hosts to infect humans. The House Select Subcommittee on the COVID-19 Pandemic found that two military intelligence agency scientists from the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence authored a working paper that was highly critical of the main zoonotic origin thesis published earlier that year by a NIH-funded scientist named Kristian Andersen in Nature magazine — and used as the primary piece of evidence for the media and other government agencies to discount lab leak theories.

Andersen has been a focus of congressional inquiries because he quickly claimed COVID-19 was man-made and then flipped to the natural evolution theory.

While not disproving Andersen et al.’s conclusions, the DIA scientists found that the evidence presented in that Nature article “does not prove that the virus arose naturally,” and in fact rested on several assumptions, like assuming the motivations of Chinese researchers and trusting in Chinese research transparency about prior work.

You can read that DIA presentation here.

Supporters of Dr. Fauci, who ran the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease during the pandemic and for decades before it, argued the most likely origin of the virus was a wet-market where dangerous animals were sold for food near Wuhan around November 2019.

But government officials told Just the News the intelligence community had vast amounts of classified evidence for years that disputed the natural origins theory and pointed toward a lab leak of a man-made pathogen prior to December 2019, including:

• The first COVID-19-like death reported in China occurred in September 2019, well before the alleged wet market episode. That detail was recently made public in the state of Missouri’s successful $24 billion lawsuit against China for hiding details of the pandemic;
• U.S. agencies had signal intelligence indicating activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in October 2019 suggesting a biological hazard cleanup occurred, just a few weeks after the first death was reported. That type of cleanup is consistent with a lab leak;
• Some scientists associated with WIV came down with COVID-19 in fall 2019 and were treated in the Wuhan area.
• Several U.S. military athletes were sickened with COVID at the World Military Games held in Wuhan in October and November 2019;
• Some WIV scientists were identified as working at the Wuhan military games as hygienists, raising suspicions among intelligence agencies; and
• China tried to report to the United States government in December the genetic data sequence for the COVID-19 virus, but it was deleted by NIH scientists.

Sen. Marshall also relayed another important revelation to the intelligence community inspector general: American spies had obtained classified evidence in 2021 that China planned two years earlier to develop a man-made coronavirus nearly identical to COVID-19, also known in the scientific community as SARS2.

“U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) had classified access in July 2021 to a proposed research plan that, if completed, could have produced a synthetic coronavirus in 2019 with the same unique construction as SARS-CoV-2 (SARS2),” Marshall’s letter stated. 

Intelligence community divided over COVID's cause

Some of the DIA’s doubts about the zoonotic origins of the virus were first reported by The Wall Street Journal in December 2024 and Just the News in April. In all, three DIA scientists— Hardham, the author of the presentation; Robert Cutlip and Jean-Paul Chretien, the authors of the working paper, took the lead in DIA's assessment.

Cutlip is a longtime DIA scientist with a doctorate in biomechanics engineering and served on the White House coronavirus task force under the first Trump administration. Chretien is a Navy doctor who previously worked for the White House on biodefense. 

The DIA's detailed analysis is missing in Biden's intelligence assessment, which tried to argue against a genetically engineered virus.

“In addition, the IC was able to reach broad agreement on several other key issues. We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon. Most agencies also assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered; however, two agencies believe there was insufficient evidence to make an assessment either way,” the unclassified summary of the 90-day investigation reads. 

“Analysts at three IC elements remain unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, with some analysts favoring natural origin, others a laboratory origin, and some seeing the hypotheses as equally likely,” it also concludes. 

“The IC judges they will be unable to provide a more definitive explanation for the origin of COVID-19 unless new information allows them to determine the specific pathway for initial natural contact with an animal or to determine that a laboratory in Wuhan was handling SARS- CoV-2 or a close progenitor virus before COVID-19 emerged,” the summary report reads.