Ever since the outbreak of the global covid-19 pandemic, there has been an ongoing debate about how and where the deadly coronavirus originated in China, with the two leading theories being a natural origin in animals or a leak from a laboratory where it was being manipulated and studied.

Reports now indicate that President Joe Biden's administration attempted to suppress the "lab leak" theory during his first year in office, according to Fox News.

Intelligence officials who supported the lab leak theory are said to have been excluded from a special briefing and report ordered by Biden in 2021 while officials who promoted the natural origin theory were featured prominently.

FBI shut out of covid origin report for Biden

In an exclusive investigative report issued last week, The Wall Street Journal reported on the alleged efforts of the Biden administration to suppress and discredit the covid-19 lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory.

Shortly after President Biden took office, he ordered all of the federal intelligence agencies to provide him with an assessment of where and how the virus originated in China in 2019 within 90 days, with those reports due by an August 2021 deadline.

An FBI official who specializes in microbiology, Jason Bannan, believed that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was leaked, likely accidentally, which the FBI as a whole agreed to with "moderate confidence," but neither Bannan nor the FBI was included in the White House's National Intelligence Council's report or invited to the briefing given to the president.

Meanwhile, other intelligence agencies and the Council as a whole had assessed with "low confidence" that the virus originated in animals and naturally made the jump to humans, and that was the view that was presented to Biden.

"Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing," Bannan told the Journal. "I find it surprising that the White House didn’t ask."

DIA scientists silenced over lab leak theory

It wasn't just Bannan and the FBI who found their lab leak origin theory suppressed by the Biden White House, though, as three scientists with the National Center for Medical Intelligence, part of the Defense Intelligence Agency, similarly found themselves shut out, according to the Journal.

Those three scientists -- John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien -- had discovered evidence that the covid-19 virus had been manipulated via known "gain of function" research at the Wuhan lab, but the DIA as a whole had assessed a natural origin for the virus and an internal report on their findings was kept in-house and suppressed.

Further, it is alleged that the three scientists were ordered to stop sharing the information they uncovered with the FBI, as the Bureau was said to be "off the reservation" with its lab leak assessment.

A DIA inspector general's inquiry was launched into the suppression of the three scientists' views, but the Journal was unable to determine what, if anything, ever came of that probe.

The process was rigged

A Newsmax op-ed suggested that the Journal's report supported prior suspicions that President Biden's ordered 90-day assessment of the origins of the pandemic had been rigged from the beginning, both to align with his own belief that the virus originated naturally as well as to discredit former President Donald Trump, who believed the virus initially leaked from the Wuhan lab.

At that time, the media was beginning to report on the increasingly compelling evidence of a lab leak, effectively proving Trump correct. That had to be suppressed, however, as it threatened to expose his soft-on-China policies.