Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND) has been allegedly accused of hiding the evidence that pointed to the specificity of the COVID-19 origins in 2020.
The agency reportedly collected evidence in the early days of the pandemic that convinced it that COVID-19 originated from the lab.
Berlin then decided to keep their conclusion secret as a result of fear of possible mistakes and political confrontations.
The BND dispatched a team of specialists to investigate the origins of the virus in the early weeks of 2020, the reports said.
They focused on Chinese government agencies and scientific institutions, including the Wuhan laboratory, where they reportedly discovered documents the German media describe as “fascinating and explosive.”
The German intelligence agency’s findings included data on experiments with coronaviruses, as well as a series of unpublished studies from 2019 to 2020, including those dealing with the effects of coronavirus on the human brain.
“The material suggests that an unusually large amount of knowledge about the supposedly novel virus was available in Wuhan at an unusually early stage.”
After assessing the material shared by the member nations, the team of investigators concluded that there is “80 to 95 per cent certainty” that Covid “likely originated in a Chinese laboratory.” The investigators also pointed to the accident stemming from lax safety rules in the Wuhan lab.
The results were presented to former chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, but it was sceptical and decided not to make the findings public; the information was not even shared with WHO, it said.
Berlin was reportedly afraid of potential complications in relations with Beijing and Washington.
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Meanwhile, similar conclusions were also drawn by the CIA, which said in January 2025 that it believed “with low confidence” that Covid-19 likely originated in a lab. The Chinese government has repeatedly rejected the lab leak theory.
Keep in mind that European nations were most affected by Covid-19 and also saw a staggering amount of deaths as a result of this viral disease.