An investigation conducted five years after the outbreak of COVID-19 has revealed intelligence agents in Germany had early on concluded the virus resulted from a lab leak.
The lab leak theory was quashed by mainstream media and politicians across the globe, slamming it as a “racist” attack on China. President Donald Trump, for example, was smeared in the media for referring to COVID-19 as the “China virus.”
The official story established early on was that the virus came from bats at a wet market in Wuhan, central China. Anyone who questioned that narrative or suggested it could have been a lab leak was immediately labelled a “conspiracy theorist.”
An investigative report published in the German publication Süddeutsche Zeitung Wednesday, followed by an English-language analysis by the German Review, detailed how Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) under two different chancellors attempted to share their conclusions with authorities.
“For reasons that aren’t totally clear, successive German governments refused for years to let the BND share its findings with the outside world,” wrote the Review.
BND spies in 2020 obtained a trove of unpublished data and research from within the Wuhan Institute of Virology that showed scientists “knew an unusual amount about the supposedly novel virus at an unusually early stage,” the Süddeutsche states.
At the head of the Wuhan lab was Dr. Zheng-Li Shi, infamous as the “bat woman” due to her excursions to western China to collect bats and isolated their viruses for “gain-of-function” research backed by Western funding.
The BND at the time concluded with a certainty of “between 80% and 95%” the virus leaked from a lab and not through “natural spill over” from animals into humans.
The secret service then approached then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office — but they were told to stifle their findings for fear of it fomenting international tensions.
When Olaf Scholz became chancellor in late 2021, the BND immediately informed his administration of their findings — but were told the same thing.
In late 2024, the COVID-19 narrative became more widely discussed in mainstream media without the tight guardrails that became evident during the pandemic.
That shift “allowed the BND to share its findings with the CIA, which then changed its evaluation from having no stance on a lab leak to considering it ‘somewhat plausible,’ reported the Review.
The BND around the same time was instructed by Scholz’ office to consult with controversial virologist Christian Drosten — and the BND was reluctant to do so.
“Scholz's people ask the BND to first discuss the laboratory thesis with Drosten in complete secrecy. But, due to a mixture of secrecy on the part of the spy service, personal reservations and a distrust that is difficult to explain, that never happened,” stated the Süddeutsche investigation.
“Apparently, the BND didn’t trust Dr. Drosten, Germany’s most respected virologist and a leading government advisor, enough to keep the dossier secret,” commented the Review.
“One possible explanation is that the BND saw Drosten as biased and were suspicious of his links to Chinese researchers at the very Wuhan lab at the centre of their case.”
The Review points back to its own work conducted in 2021 that indicated Drosten “knew about COVID even before the WHO did, thanks to his personal contacts with scientists in China. “
“At the time, Drosten didn’t want to say who had passed him the virus’s genome shortly after Christmas 2019,” wrote the publication, but in a 2025 interview with German outlet Taz, he gave himself away.
“I knew the lead scientist from the (coronavirus) research department at Wuhan… I contacted her right at the beginning and had the impression that she didn't know exactly what was happening, but as expected, she was dealing with it directly,” Drosten told Taz.
The Review points out “there is a good reason for why Drosten knew the bat woman: he had been intimately involved in lobbying for gain-of-function research in the decade before 2020” and even “edited a paper Dr. Shi published on viruses that were adapted to human cell cultures back in 2015.”
“Most notoriously, he joined leading scientists behind ‘gain-of-function’ research in signing an open letter that labelled a lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory.’”
While Drosten spent the last several years “vehemently” denying there could be a lab leak, calling it “extremely implausible” and asserting “you don't just accidentally get infected with this kind of virus in a lab,” he has started to change his tune as of late.
Drosten told Taz a lab leak “was plausible after all,” reported the Review.
“You vehemently argued from the outset that a natural origin was more likely than a laboratory accident,” the Taz journalist replied.
“I may have been accused of being vehement, but it was never actually like that. I simply stated what we knew in my field of science. And I should also point out that the evidence has evolved since 2020 and so has my assessment,” said Drosten.
“I have to say, the more time passes, the more skeptical I become. Does some vital interest of the (Chinese) state prohibit work on this? Perhaps. But the other explanation would be that this was no natural virus at all.”