Why did US government lab sit on explosive COVID origins report for five months?
A report overseen by Dr. David Rakestraw (above) found that a lab leak was a plausible origin scenario for COVID-19  Questions are mounting about whether officials intentionally suppressed a top secret government report concluding COVID-19 could have originated in a lab leak, after it emerged that the study took five months to reach the State Department. Lawrence Livermore National Lab's secretive 'Z Division' intelligence unit produced the report on May 27, 2020, but it did not reach the State Department until last October, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Dr. David J. Rakestraw, a senior science adviser who formerly ran LLNL's biodefense programs and coordinated the labs COVID-19 technical response, was reportedly intimately involved in the preparation of the Z Division report. The classified study weighed the lab leak possibility as well as the theory that the pandemic crossed over naturally from an animal, and concluded that both scenarios were plausible and could not be ruled out. This explosive conclusion, which came at a time when many experts were loudly clamoring that a lab leak origin was impossible, could have significantly impacted the debate if the study had been more widely circulated. 'We will not be commenting on this issue,' Livermore Public Affairs Director Lynda Seaver told DailyMail.com on Tuesday when asked about the delay in the report's distribution to other government departments. Lawrence Livermore National Lab's (above) secretive 'Z Division' intelligence unit produced the report on May 27, 2020, but it did not reach the State Department until last October  The slow distribution of the Z Division report across the top levels of government frustrated Trump administration officials and led some of them to seek access to reporting by other intelligence agencies on the subject, according to Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which first revealed the existence of the study. On May 11, three House Republicans sent a letter to Livermore Director Kimberly S. Budil, demanding that Rakestraw appear before Congress to deliver a classified briefing on the Z Division report. 'Rare' genome sequence suggests the virus WAS man-made Two U.S. experts have penned a damning essay saying that science strongly suggests the novel coronavirus was manufactured inside a Chinese laboratory. The claim was made by Drs Stephen Quay, CEO of biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics Inc, and Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California Berkeley, in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. In the op-ed, the men say their proof lies in genome sequencing, or analyzing the DNA, of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. There are 36 DNA segments - made up of three-letter 'words' - that viruses use to make an amino acid known as L-arginine. L-arginine helps make proteins but is also often used in so-called 'gain of function' research, which alters viruses to make them more transmissible and more deadly. The new virus contains a segment called CGG-CGG, which is considered rare even in experiments in which researchers are trying to manipulate virus. But even more telling is that this combination has never been found naturally in any other type of coronavirus, including in SARS and MERS, both of which are cousins of the new virus. 'A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn't present in any other virus,' Quay and Muller wrote. 'The CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here.' Advertisement  The letter gave a May 25 deadline for response, but it was not immediately clear whether the briefing ever took place. In May 2020, as the Z Division was finalizing its report on COVID origin scenarios, Rakestraw referred to COVID-19 as 'a natural occurrence' in an interview on YouTube. However he also framed the pandemic in the context of Chinese gain-of-function research, the controversial field that involves genetically modifying dangerous viruses to make them more lethal, in order to assess the risks of future outbreaks. 'The thing that I've worked on probably the hardest being able to respond rapidly to biological threats as they appeared,' Rakestraw said in the interview. 'And we were focused on both the potential for natural occurrences, like the most recent COVID-19, but also on the potential for adversaries to use advances in biotechnology to create novel threats that we wouldn't have vaccines for,' he added. Livermore is one of the 17 National Laboratories that President Joe Biden has ordered to assist in a new 90-day intelligence review of of the pandemic's origins. 'We've been putting a large amount of focus for the last six years on using the computational resources at LLNL to try to accelerate the timescales for developing a response to an emerging biological threat,' Rakestraw said in a Livermore press release early in the pandemic. 'That effort has put us in a position where we have tools now that are applicable to helping with the current response,' he said. The sprawling Livermore lab has an annual budget of $2.5 billion and employs 7,900 people. It is largely funded by the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. The California lab has not confirmed the contents of their report, which remains secret. Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, has urged China to be more transparent about what they knew, when. 'What the government didn't do in the early days and still hasn't done is given us the transparency we need,' Blinken said on Sunday, in an interview with Axios. The White House has also accused China of obstructing investigations into the source of the pandemic. Concerns have been raised about 'gain-of-function' research taking place at the Wuhan Institute for Virology (above), located in the city where the outbreak began  The World Health Organization (WHO) sent a team to the Wuhan lab in late January, but the investigators were only allowed in for three hours, and were not granted access to all the documentation they required. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, said their visit was inconclusive and upbraided China for being uncooperative. Dr Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical adviser and the nation's top infectious disease expert, is now facing scrutiny over what he knew, when - and whether he was always straight with the public. His critics, mainly Republicans, accuse him of downplaying the 'lab leak' theory because it was promoted heavily by Donald Trump. The critics also argue that Fauci did not want to admit at the time that U.S. taxpayers' money was being directed to the Wuhan lab. He has since confirmed that $820,000 was given to the lab, over six years, to fund their research into coronaviruses. Inside the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where scientists a year ago were investigating whether COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China  Fauci justified the spending when quizzed on it before Congress last month, insisting that it was vital to understand coronaviruses coming from bats, and the bats were in China. He said it would have been a dereliction of duty not to support the scientific research. Fauci also insisted that the grants were not being used on 'gain of function' research, whereby viruses are made more transmissible or deadly, to understand their capabilities. He said the scientific studies published thanks to U.S. funding bore no evidence of 'gain of function' research. But he admitted that he had no way of knowing if the Wuhan lab was carrying out experiments in secret.