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Germany’s federal intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), assessed in 2020 that there was an 80-95% probability that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for Covid-19, originated in a Chinese laboratory, according to a new report by German media outlets Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
German Government Suppressed Findings
The revelation comes as the world marks five years since the Covid-19 pandemic began. The virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 before spreading globally. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared Covid-19 a pandemic.
According to the report, the BND’s findings were based on classified intelligence but were neither publicly disclosed nor shared with Western allies. Successive German governments—first under Chancellor Angela Merkel and later under Chancellor Olaf Scholz—blocked the release of this intelligence.
During much of 2020, the idea that Covid-19 could have originated from a laboratory was dismissed by governments, scientists, and media organizations as a conspiracy theory. The dominant assumption at the time was that the virus had emerged naturally, likely jumping from bats to humans. However, despite years of research, no concrete evidence of natural origin has surfaced. In contrast, circumstantial evidence supporting the lab-leak hypothesis has continued to grow.
BND’s Secret Operation on Covid-19: Project Saaremaa
In early 2020, as Covid-19 spread globally, the BND launched a covert intelligence operation codenamed Project Saaremaa to investigate the virus’s origin. The operation, detailed by Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung, involved intelligence officers specializing in gathering sensitive information from foreign governments and scientific institutions.
The BND reportedly obtained a trove of unpublished data, internal documents from Chinese research institutions, and dissertations from 2019 and 2020. Among the key targets was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which has long been at the center of lab-origin theories.
A crucial element of the BND’s assessment was the observation that the Chinese government and scientific community had an “unusually large amount of knowledge” about the supposedly novel virus at a very early stage. This suggested that SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating for longer than officially acknowledged.
According to the report, the intelligence agency uncovered extensive research on coronaviruses, including previously unseen data on animal experiments, unpublished scientific studies, and academic theses that examined the effects of coronaviruses on the human brain.
Germany Withheld Findings on Covid-19 for Four Years
Despite the significance of the intelligence, the German government chose to keep the findings classified. The report states that Merkel’s administration first suppressed the information, and Scholz’s government continued this policy.
For four years, the intelligence was not shared with Western allies, including the United States. It was only in December 2024 that Germany reportedly provided the BND’s findings to the United States for the first time.
The suppression of the BND’s findings occurred even as global scrutiny of Covid-19’s origins intensified. In early 2021, following media investigations and whistleblower accounts, then-U.S. President Joe Biden ordered a review of intelligence on Covid-19’s origins. While the U.S. intelligence community did not reach a definitive conclusion, one agency expressed confidence in the lab-leak hypothesis, and others refused to rule it out.
By the end of Biden’s term, three major U.S. agencies—the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Energy, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—had concluded that a lab origin was the most likely scenario.
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