Chicago City Wire

Andrew Huff, epidemiologist and author of “The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History,” says there are now three official reports supporting the "lab leak hypothesis" surrounding COVID-19.

Speaking on AM 560's "Chicago's Morning Answer" on Feb. 28, Huff said that two of the reports came from the U.S. Energy Department, and one from the FBI, all of which suggested that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

“What’s so fascinating here is I actually used to be a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories,” he said on the program. “That’s one of the national laboratories managed by the Department of Energy. So a lot of people have been asking: Why is the Department of Energy giving an opinion here? Well, because the DOE controls and runs or manages the national laboratory system. And a big component of that is biological weapons, bioterror, pandemics, pandemic response, even public health in the context of national security and warfare. And that’s exactly where I used to work, and I'm sort of familiar with this process."

Huff’s book was released in December. He told the station, "The National Laboratories doing this type of work is that they have access to top-secret intelligence and technology, which civilian scientists are academics don’t. So oftentimes when you work in the National Laboratory, you have a much better sense of the bigger picture of what’s really going on. And sometimes that intelligence isn't really of any value to your scientific work, but it helps you give some insight or put it into context.”

According to a Wall Street Journal report on Feb. 26, the Energy Department concluded that COVID-19 likely arose from the Wuhan lab. Huff says the article isn't the first suggestion of the leak. The agency’s revised assessment of how the pandemic started is based on new intelligence, according to WSJ.

“The interesting thing about this Wall Street Journal article is that this is actually the second report from the Department of Energy," he said. "The first one came out from Lawrence Livermore (National) Laboratory, which is on the West Coast, and that was from the 'Z' Division, which is the intelligence component of scientific research and technology there," which is the sister group of the lab Huff worked with at Sandia. 

"So what what you’re seeing here is you have two different reports out of the Department of Energy," he said. "One came from intelligence, one came from scientists. And now this is also corroborated by a separate independent report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. So now we have three different reports that use different data assessment methods that all come to the same conclusion that SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 leaked out of the the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There’s still some debate whether or not the Chinese intentionally released it." 

The article highlights evidence that suggests the virus could have been accidentally released from a lab, including reports of illness among workers at the lab in November 2019, before the first reported cases of COVID-19, Huff said.

"I’m in the leak camp, because I haven’t seen the facts to support an intentional release. I’m open to it. But I think the facts which I actually discussed in the book suggest that was actually a leak and not an intentional release," he said.

Some have suggested that the Biden administration has gone to great lengths to censor those who’ve discussed the lab leak theory. David Zweig, a journalist involved in the release of Twitter Files, said the White House got social media companies to censor information about COVID-19 "by censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. government policy, by discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed, by suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s own data,” Zweig said in a Dec. 26, 2022, tweet.

The New York Post reported that internal emails from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suggest that officials had been working closely with social media companies to identify and remove content that they believed is misleading about COVID-19.

“China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,” the New York Post quoted from Huff's book. “The U.S. government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese. Foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

Huff’s involvement with EcoHealth Alliance has been backed up by the University of Minnesota, but in response to the book, EcoHealth Alliance repeated several outdated talking points, including “scientific evidence to date indicates that the virus is likely the result of viral evolution in nature.” That suggestion comes despite the reports Huff cited from the DOE and the FBI saying that COVID-19 originated in a lab.

Huff has also argued that Facebook's fact-checking program has become politicized, with fact checkers flagging content based on their own biases rather than objective truth, according to the New York Post.

Zweig went on to write that the Biden administration pressured Twitter to both “elevate” and “suppress” users based on their stances on COVID-19, censoring information that was "true but inconvenient” to policymakers, according to the New York Post.