China dismisses FBI director's admission that Wuhan lab is 'most likely' origin of COVID-19, hounds Elon Musk over lab-leak claim

 FBI Director Christopher Wray admitted during an interview Tuesday that the bureau has long suspected the COVID-19 pandemic to have been the result of a lab incident in Wuhan, China — a possibility the Chinese Communist Party, Dr. Anthony Fauci, members of the media, and so-called experts have spent years downplaying.

CCP apparatchiks lashed out, suggesting that Wray's recognition of Beijing's possible culpability hurt American credibility.

A CCP-run propaganda outfit similarly lashed out at Twitter CEO Elon Musk over his circulation of a report concerning the lab-leak theory, intimating that doing so may have consequences.

These two incidents, which occurred just hours apart, signal Beijing's growing sensitivity amid mounting Western certainty about the CCP's hand in the deaths of tens of millions of people worldwide.

The FBI's delayed admission

In his Tuesday interview with Fox News' Bret Baier, Wray confirmed a suggestion made in a recent Wall Street Journal report: that the FBI had determined with "moderate confidence" in 2021 that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak and maintains this view.

In the same report, the Journal detailed how the Department of Energy has confirmed that it similarly suspects COVID-19 leaked from a communist Chinese lab.

"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," Wray told Baier. "Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab."

Extra to its possible responsibility for a global pandemic, FBI Director Wray suggested that the CCP has been hard at work on a cover-up, seeking to undermine international efforts to ascertain the origins of the COVID-19 virus.

"I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that’s unfortunate for everybody," said Wray.

TheBlaze previously reported that extra to possible culpability over the potential manufacture and release of the virus (i.e., at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab), Chinese authorities also delayed warning the world about the emergence of the deadly disease, going to great lengths to silence doctors like the late Lie Wenliang, who tried to raise the alarm.

Communist officials waited until Dec. 31 to alert the World Health Organization, then claimed, "The disease is preventable and controllable."

A Five Eyes intelligence dossier accused the CCP in May 2020 of engaging in an "assault on international transparency" to the "endangerment of other countries," reported the New York Post.

The intelligence dossier indicated that the genocidal Chinese regime had scrambled to bury evidence of the virus and its origins, "destroying" lab samples, censoring evidence of spread, and denying sample requests from other countries.

Marty Makary, a professor of public health policy at John Hopkins University, told Congress Tuesday it is a "no-brainer" that a Chinese lab was responsible for the pandemic, reported Newsweek.

"The epicenter of the world [coronavirus pandemic] is five miles from one of the only high-level virology labs in China. The doctors initially were arrested and forced to sign non-disclosure gag documents," said Makary. "The lab reports have been destroyed; they've not been turned over. The sequence reported from the lab to the NIH database were deleted by a request from Chinese scientists that called over early on and said, 'Delete those sequences we put in the database.'"

More denial from Beijing

The Associated Press reported that the Chinese regime's foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning claimed Tuesday that "by rehashing the lab-leak theory, the U.S. will not succeed in discrediting China, and instead, it will only hurt its own credibility."

Ning said, "We urge the U.S. to respect science and facts ... stop turning origin tracing into something about politics and intelligence, and stop disrupting social solidarity and origins cooperation."

Despite China having barred entry to members of the World Health Organization team investigating the outbreak in early 2021, destroyed evidence about the outbreak, and silenced whistleblowers, Ning claimed that China has been "open and transparent" in the quest for answers about COVID-19 and has "shared the most data and research results on virus tracing and made important contributions to global virus tracing research."

Wray was not the only target of the CCP's ire over the renewed interest in the lab-leak theory.

Broken pots

The investigative journalist behind the Substack Kanekoa News tweeted a video compilation concerning Fauci's alleged funding of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Lab and lies about having done so before Congress.

Noting that "now both the FBI & the Department of Energy have concluded that the coronavirus originated at the Wuhan lab," Kanekoa asked, "Does that mean Dr. Anthony Fauci funded the development of COVID-19?"

Elon Musk, who previously suggested that his pronouns were "Prosecute/Fauci," responded, "He did it via a pass-through organization (EcoHealth)."

As a result of Musk's participation in this particular discussion concerning the "likely" Wuhan lab origins of the virus, the Global Times, a CCP propaganda paper, threatened the tech magnate, suggesting he could be "breaking the pot of China."

CNBC's Eunice Yoon noted that this expression is the Chinese equivalent of "biting the hand that feeds you," likely intimating there could be repercussions, given that China is Tesla's second-largest market and the company has considerable assets in the country, including its factory campus in Shanghai.

Yoon indicated that the Global Times also wrote, "Some may think @elonmusk made those remarks only to attack Fauci," but the posts he retweeted "almost all link the origins of #Covid19 to China and the argument is repeatedly used by the US right wing and anti-China media hostile to China to frame #China."

Some in Washington suspect that this international battle for the truth is backgrounded by a far more significant struggle.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) emphasized Tuesday during the first hearing of the House select committee on China, which he chairs, that China cannot be trusted and must be taken deadly seriously: "We may call this a 'strategic competition,' but it's not a polite tennis match. ... This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century — and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake."

H.R. McMaster testified before the committee, saying, "You could say that the Chinese Communist Party is the Harry Houdini of Marxist Leninist regimes, the David Copperfield of communism, the Criss Angel of autocracy, but the magic is fading. There's really no excuse any more for being fooled about Beijing's intentions."