Wuhan Lab China
A CIA whistleblower has informed Congress that the agency offered officials investigating the origins of COVID-19 a “significant monetary incentive” to change their positions from COVID originating from a Wuhan lab leak to a position of being “unable to determine” the origins, according to a Fox News report.
House Coronavirus Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner sent letters to CIA Director William Burns as well as a former official, stating that they have received “new and concerning whistleblower testimony regarding the Agency’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19.”
The letters stated that “a multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer has come forward to provide information to the Committees regarding the Agency’s analysis into the origins of COVID-19.”
The whistleblower informed Congress that the CIA assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team, consisting of “multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”
In their letters, Wenstrup and Turner also stated that “according to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed that intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
They added: “the seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the one officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.”
Most significantly they noted that “the whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
It was made clear that the allegations come from “a seemingly credible source,” and Wenstrup and Turner now require further oversight on “how the CIA handled its internal investigation into the origins of COVID-19.”
The lawmakers have now asked for the CIA to “turn over all records regarding the establishment of the COVID Discovery Teams; records regarding communications from those teams; all documents and records involving CIA communications with all members of federal government agencies including the FBI, State Department, Health and Human Services, Energy Department and more,” setting a deadline of Sept. 26, of this year to comply.
In addition to those records, Wenstrup and Turner also asked for documents and communications pertaining to “the pay history, to include the awarding of any type of financial or performance-based incentive/financial bonus to members of all iterations of the COVID Discovery Teams.”
In a separate letter to Andrew Makridis, the former chief operating officer at the CIA, Wenstrup and Turner wrote that the whistleblower suggested that the former COO “played a central role in its formation and eventual conclusion that the CIA was unable to determine the origins of COVID-19” and requested he participate in a “voluntary transcribed interview on Sept. 26, 2023.”
The intelligence community has still not officially committed to a conclusion regarding the origin of COVID-19 and whether or not it was a lab leak or that it originated due to “natural exposure” to an infected animal, such as one from the wet markets in China, as was circulated in the press early on.
Regardless of the differing opinions on the origin of COVID-19, it was concluded that “almost all” of the agencies agree that COVID was not “genetically engineered” and that the entire intelligence community is in agreement that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, was “not developed as a biological weapon.”
