For most of the past five years, a whole lot of otherwise seemingly intelligent people insisted Covid-19 was just a really unlucky naturally occurring bat virus that just happened to mutate in a way that made it nearly ideal for infecting human beings, and it coincidentally popped up down the road from an institution that was doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats in a lab that wasn’t up to the international standards for doing that kind of research.

To quote the late Norm MacDonald, “or so the Germans would have us believe.”

Actually, it turns out that the German government’s intelligence service did its own investigation into the likely origins of the pandemic back in 2020 and concluded that likelihood of lab leak was “80 to 95 percent.” From the German newspaper Die Zeit, translated into English:

According to research by ZEIT and the Süddeutsche Zeitung , the German foreign intelligence service is said to have initiated investigations into the origin of the coronavirus as early as 2020. Until now, an animal market in Wuhan had been suspected as the trigger for the global pandemic.

However, the BND’s investigations led to a different conclusion. According to the BND, the virus originated in a Chinese laboratory with a probability of “80 to 95 percent.” In addition to a series of animal experiments, research was also conducted there on the effects of coronaviruses on the human brain. At that time, an “unusually large amount of knowledge about the supposedly novel virus” was already available, according to the research. The result of the investigation, which has not yet been conclusively proven, therefore also raises questions about the responsibility of the Chinese government in the coronavirus pandemic.

You might be wondering why you didn’t hear this intelligence analysis and conclusion from the German government until now. Well, according to the German publication, the chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, didn’t think the public had a right to know; Merkel denies the allegation.

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) has rejected allegations that her government covered up findings on the origin of the coronavirus in 2020. A spokesperson for the former chancellor responded to a Tagesspiegel inquiry by saying she “fundamentally rejects” the allegation. She also stated that she is unable to comment personally on the matter.

Merkel was confronted by the newspaper with information suggesting that a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, could have triggered the global coronavirus pandemic. The Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had already come to this conclusion in 2020, but according to research by ZEIT and the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Merkel’s Chancellery  decided at the time to withhold this information from the public for the time being.

One can’t help but wonder if Merkel and the rest of the higher-ups in the German government were afraid to confront Germany’s largest trading partner about evidence that their reckless experimentation with making viruses more virulent and contagious had ended up killing more than 183,000 Germans. After all, BMW sales in China had just hit an all-time high!

Remember, there’s no solid evidence that Angela Merkel was an agent of a hostile foreign power. Her judgment is just that bad, which somehow feels even worse.