(USRTK)—A newly declassified Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory assessment from May 2020 concluded that all of the conditions necessary for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus were present at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.
The report was among nearly 400 pages of COVID-19 origins records released Thursday by the outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as part of a broader document dump that included internal Intelligence Community (IC) emails, scientific publications, diplomatic cables, congressional correspondence and documents related to U.S.-funded coronavirus research in Wuhan.
The Lawrence Livermore report found that Wuhan researchers possessed the capabilities, materials and research programs that would have been required to create and accidentally release a coronavirus adapted to infect humans.
“We assess all of the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus – specifically a coronavirus adapted to recognize human cell receptors – were present at the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology in mid-to-late 2019,” the report states.
As a result, analysts at the California-based national laboratory said they placed “equal weight” on three possible scenarios for the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that spawned the pandemic: a lab-modification followed by an accidental leak, natural emergence or an accidental release of a naturally-occurring virus from a laboratory.
The previously unreleased report was prepared on May 27, 2020 by Lawrence Livermore’s Z Program, which supports U.S. intelligence and national security missions. The report states that it also “used additional intelligence information from a CIA Field Analytic Conversation.” Large portions of the document remain redacted.
The report appears to be the same document that CIA whistleblower James Erdman III testified last month had concluded all prerequisite conditions for a lab leak were present at WIV but was inexplicably excluded from the IC’s public assessments throughout 2020 and shared only in a classified annex the following year. Erdman identified that record as a May 2020 report that was produced by “a DOE national lab.”
ODNI’s press office did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment about the records.
The Lawrence Livermore assessment identified four conditions that would have been necessary for a laboratory-origin scenario. Those included access to a virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2, use of a reverse genetics system capable of modifying coronaviruses, experiments involving human ACE2 receptors and biosafety failures or lab accidents involving coronavirus research.
The report stopped short of concluding that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered or that a lab leak occurred. Rather, it argued that available information showed that the WIV possessed the capabilities and research activities needed for such a scenario.
The ODNI’s release of declassified records came two days after the lapse of a 180-day deadline set by the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. That law, passed in December, required the intelligence Community to review and publicly release additional COVID-19 origins intelligence. The law directed the Director of National Intelligence to conduct a declassification review, along with the heads of intelligence agencies, of intelligence on coronavirus research at the WIV, funding sources for that research, gain-of-function work and Chinese government efforts to obstruct investigations into the pandemic’s origins.
ODNI did not specifically cite the law when releasing the Livermore report and other records on Thursday. The release also came on the eve of Gabbard’s departure from ODNI after she announced her resignation last month.
Also included in Thursday’s release was a final progress report from the EcoHealth Alliance’s NIH-funded bat coronavirus research project that partnered with the WIV. Much of the information contained in that report has been publicly available previously through congressional investigations, FOIA disclosures and media reports, but its inclusion with the newly released records provides additional context about the types of coronavirus experiments that were conducted through the now defunct nonprofit’s collaboration with Chinese researchers before the pandemic.
The new records also provide additional insight into how U.S. government analysts evaluated competing origin theories during the earliest months of the pandemic.
Newly released emails show intelligence officials debating gain-of-function research, reverse genetics techniques, the virus’s unusual furin cleavage site and competing scientific explanations for how SARS-CoV-2 emerged.
In one March 2020 exchange, an analyst cautioned colleagues to set “a very high threshold” before concluding the virus resulted from gain-of-function research – lab manipulations that increase a virus’s infectivity and transmissibility to other species.
While acknowledging concerns about coronavirus research at the WIV, the analyst wrote that “Occam’s razor is the best guidance here,” arguing that natural explanations such as viral recombination remained plausible and shouldn’t be discounted. At the same time, the analyst stressed that a possible laboratory origin deserved rigorous scrutiny. “I’m not saying WIV isn’t guilty of creating this strain, but I think we need to pin it down hard before we make this assessment,” the analyst wrote. “I think the IC needs to be very thorough with its analysis.”
The emails show analysts grappling with evidence pointing in different directions. Some records discussed reports concerning coronavirus experiments at the WIV, while others circulated scientific papers arguing that SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t engineered and may have arisen naturally. The exchanges suggest that intelligence analysts were evaluating competing hypotheses rather than trying to confirm a settled conclusion.
The documents build on records previously obtained and reported by U.S. Right To Know showing that Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analysts were already considering lab-origin scenarios as early as March 2020, months before the issue became a major public debate. A genomic analysis by scientists at the DIA’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) published internally three months later also found the scenario that an engineered virus escaped from the WIV plausible, and became one of the first, and only, full assessments to emerge publicly. But that report, obtained via a FOIA lawsuit, also wasn’t referenced when the ODNI issued a public summary on intelligence assessments in its 2021 90-day origins study.
While the earlier DIA records established that intelligence analysts were examining the possibility of a lab leak early on, the newly released Lawrence Livermore assessment partially provides one of the only explanations to date of why some U.S. government experts believed the scenario warranted serious consideration at such an early stage in the pandemic.
ODNI’s records disclosure Thursday was accompanied by an agency press release that went further than what the documents themselves appear to show, accusing former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci of manipulating intelligence assessments and lying to Congress about his contacts with intelligence officials.
The records provide a more limited picture. Among them were email exchanges showing intelligence officials discussing Fauci, circulating scientific materials associated with him and receiving briefings from him as they evaluated competing origin theories. A July 2021 email chain shows officials considered asking Fauci to review a COVID-19 origins assessment before deciding against the idea because he would be viewed as having a conflict of interest. The records also show analysts receiving scientific views from other officials at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that were not always aligned with Fauci’s public position backing a natural-origins scenario while actively debating lab-origin scenarios and other evidence.
But the press release also independently cited an unnamed whistleblower’s testimony that alleged retaliation against analysts who challenged Fauci’s preferred conclusions on the virus’s origins. That description closely tracks with last month’s congressional testimony from Erdman, a CIA senior operations officer who had been detailed to an ODNI task force investigating COVID origins.
Erdman told the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee that CIA analysts repeatedly concluded a lab leak was the likely origin between 2021 and 2023, only to have their findings altered, buried or overridden by agency management. He also accused Fauci of shaping which outside scientists the IC consulted with and alleged broader retaliation and obstruction by the CIA. Erdman acknowledged, however, that he found no explicit evidence of a coordinated cover-up.
A CIA spokesperson has dismissed Erdman’s testimony as “dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing.” The whistleblower testimony referenced in the ODNI press release has been referred to the Intelligence Community’s Inspector General, the release stated.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
