From Instapundit, I started to read the post and went “REALLY? THIS Department? WHY in God’s green earth does it matter what THIS department thinks about this issue?
Yet another department going past its authorizing Legislation “mission statement” to drag itself in to do more than it should (and probably not all that well)?
I REMEMBER WHEN THIS WAS DISMISSED AS A RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORY: WSJ: Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says: Energy Department’s revised assessment is based on new intelligence.
The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office. . . .
The FBI previously came to the conclusion that the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak in 2021 with “moderate confidence” and still holds to this view.
The FBI employs a cadre of microbiologists, immunologists and other scientists and is supported by the National Bioforensic Analysis Center, which was established at Fort Detrick, Md., in 2004 to analyze anthrax and other possible biological threats.
U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.
The updated document underscores how intelligence officials are still putting together the pieces on how Covid-19 emerged. More than one million Americans have died in the pandemic that began more than three years ago.
The National Intelligence Council, which conducts long-term strategic analysis, and four agencies, which officials declined to identify, still assess with “low confidence” that the virus came about through natural transmission from an infected animal, according to the updated report.
I “get” that the FBI would be interested in where COVID came from in a national security standpoint. Ditto the National Intelligence Council. I dryly note that the Health and Human Services, HHS, wasn’t mentioned. They should be pursuing this.
But REALLY, the US Department of Energy? Since when did biologicals and diseases become part of its established portfolio? Nuclear energy, fossil fuels, renewables, how energy is transmitted and then used? Sure. Most things energy related, I’ll grant them. Is is their name, after all.
Now I deliberately, at the time of this writing, didn’t click through on the above link to write this as I’m hoping others are thinking the same thing – since WHEN should it be anything related to Energy where Wuhan Flu came from? That’s a bio domain question, an intelligence domain question, a political domain question – not energy related as far as I can tell.
Unless, of course, the entire Federal gaggle of bureaus have gone all “Woke Intersectionality” in believing that since everything MAY affect anything and everything else, they get to do what they want. Just come up with the twisted, convoluted, logic free pathway that slices the maze of “where we are supposed to be doing to what we want to be doing, eh?
And we wonder why Government no longer works? It doesn’t because it seems that nobody wants to do their jobs EXCELLENTLY and not worry about anybody else’s mission. It doesn’t because nobody respect boundaries anymore. The idea of “staying in your lane” seems to be an alien concept nowadays.
Imagine how much better Government would be IF it really did just focus on what it was mandated to do and doing it well?
It would mean that Civil Society, with respect to what the Founders believed it to be, would have to totally reconstruct itself AND wean itself from taxpayer dollars.
It WOULD mean that we, as individuals, would have to stop thinking “well somebody ought to do something about this” and get to work and do it themselves / ourselves.
I’d be good with that. And it would mean that I’d never have worry that I’d see such a headline again…
