This shocking, shocking revelation might as well have originated with Five Billion Eyes. Australia’s Daily Telegraph has published findings in an intel assessment from Five Eyes that China has not told the truth about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. The intelligence cooperative that includes the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia has concluded that Beijing has engaged in a cover-up, although all of its motives may not yet be clear.

Get ready for a major, er … Captain Obvious moment:

China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned Western governments on the COVID-19 contagion.

The 15-page research document, obtained by The Saturday Telegraph, lays the foundation for the case of negligence being mounted against China.

It states that to the “endangerment of other countries” the Chinese government covered-up news of the virus by silencing or “disappearing” doctors who spoke out, destroying evidence of it in laboratories and refusing to provide live samples to international scientists who were working on a vaccine.

Pssst … intel dudes: We kinda knew that already. What else ya got? Actually, this looks rather disturbing, but is apparently unconnected to the current coronavirus sweeping the globe:

It can also be revealed the Australian government trained and funded a team of Chinese scientists who belong to a laboratory which went on to genetically modify deadly coronaviruses that could be transmitted from bats to humans and had no cure, and is not the subject of a probe into the origins of COVID-19.

Perhaps this might not be pertinent to this outbreak, but it certainly sounds like an origin story for a future pandemic. What’s the point of this work? Is it to stop such viruses, or amplify them? Either way, it sounds like a Pandora’s Box, which is why the State Department has sent up warning flares about the Wuhan Institute of Virology for years now.

The main value of this new assessment appears to be a concise summation of everything we already know about China’s malign attempts to cover its tracks on COVID-19:

Its major themes include the “deadly denial of human-to-human transmission”, the silencing or “disappearing” of doctors and scientists who spoke out, the destruction of evidence of the virus from genomic studies laboratories, and “bleaching of wildlife market stalls”, along with the refusal to provide live virus samples to international scientists working on a vaccine.

The New York Post calls this a “bombshell,” but the only real news here might just be the leak:

The bombshell 15-page research document also indicated that the virus was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a claim initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory because Chinese officials insisted the virus came from the local wet markets, according to the Australian Daily Telegraph. …

The paper described how China downplayed the outbreak around the world while wildly scrambling to bury all traces of the disease at home, including bleaching wet market stalls, censoring the growing evidence of asymptomatic carriers of the virus and stonewalling sample requests from other countries.

The ADT article does not claim that Five Eyes have concluded it leaked from a laboratory. It does note that the US position is that a laboratory accident is more likely than the wet-market transmission theory, but Australia’s position is the opposite. No one knows for sure, but the US bases its leaning in large part on China’s robust and continuing efforts to cover their tracks and obfuscate the origins of COVID-19. It seems like an unusual effort if this was just another case of cross-over.

So why is this Five Eyes report leaking now? Presumably, it’s an intel-community response to the demand from Bill Gates and others that everyone needs to cooperate more with China, even though China keeps lying through its teeth and issuing nonsensical propaganda attacks as distractions. On Thursday, Washington Post reporter Josh Rogin — who broke the story on the State Department memos on the Wuhan Institute of Virology — scolded Gates and other such activists for ignoring the plain truth that China’s not cooperating at all, nor does it plan to cooperate to any end except its cover-up:

Gates’s comments are simply wrong, and dangerously so. Beijing’s bad behavior is neither past nor benign. In fact, it continues to put us at increased risk. …

The Chinese government misled the world about the virus early on. It manipulated statistics to downplay the outbreak’s severity, silenced whistleblowers, spread misinformation and disinformation, and censored science that didn’t fit the official narrative.

These are not academic points. Beijing continues to do all these things today. Just in the past week, Beijing pressured the European Union to censor a report addressing China’s responsibility, threatened Australia with economic pressure if it conducted an inquiry of its own, and arrested three more journalists for the crime of posting covid-19 articles on GitHub (which is, incidentally, owned by Microsoft).

It’s not just about blame. The Chinese government’s refusal to allow international experts to investigate what happened in the city of Wuhan impedes efforts to find treatments and cures. Unless the source is located, the true path of the outbreak can’t be traced and critical scientific information can’t be known. Whether you believe it came from a market, a lab or a random bat flying around Wuhan, Beijing won’t allow any of these scenarios to be examined. We have to solve the origin question to beat the outbreak and prevent the next pandemic.

And that’s not the only problem. China still won’t share original virus samples, which many international researchers are asking for. The statistics issued by China are used in models that inform our response. China didn’t report asymptomatic positive cases in its tallies until this month. That information would have been extremely useful months ago.

Again, as Rogin’s links show, none of this is new. All of this has been sufficiently reported and just plain observed over the last five months. These are not the acts of a cooperative partner — they are the acts of a secretive and dangerous adversary that places its own power far ahead of global health risks.

This intelligence leak likely has a primary intent of sending a shot across Beijing’s bow about just how much we could humiliate China unless they stop acting malevolently. However, it’s at least a secondary mission for this intelligence to plug up the gullibility gaps among elites and China apologists in the West.

Update: In separate reporting this morning, Fox’s John Roberts reports that “confidence is high” among US intel agencies that COVID-19 broke out of one of the Wuhan labs accidentally:

A Senior Intelligence Source tells me there is agreement among most of the 17 Intelligence agencies that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan lab. The source stressed that the release is believed to be a MISTAKE, and was not intentional.

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) May 2, 2020

Sources say not all 17 intelligence agencies agree that the lab was the source of the virus because there is not yet a definitive “smoking gun”. But confidence is high among 70-75% of the agencies.

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) May 2, 2020

That certainly would explain why China’s working so hard to cover it up.