CIA scientists came to believe that the coronavirus that brought the world to its knees was likely leaked from a Chinese lab, but agency higher-ups — aided by Dr. Anthony Fauci — suppressed those arguments, then punished the analysts who tried to disagree, an agency whistleblower told Congress on Wednesday.
As early as Aug. 12, 2021, the agency was considering publicly calling the virus a lab leak. But five days later, that had changed, and the CIA has refused to say why, according to James Erdman III, a career CIA operations officer who just completed a study of COVID-19 for the Director of National Intelligence.
He said some in the CIA seemed too eager to make excuses for China, and some antipathy toward President Trump may also have fueled the agency’s resistance to the possibility that the virus sprang from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The result, he told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, was a “cover-up, wasted resources and a failure to properly inform policymakers.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the …
more >
“I didn’t find any smoking gun where they said ‘We’ve got to cover this up,’” he said. “I think you get enough people shouting something down, it gets shouted down.”
He blamed a cesspool of cross-pollination, with scientists getting money from the government for their research, then called in to serve as the experts when that government goes looking for answers after something went wrong.
That included Dr. Fauci, who, he said, was shaping the experts the CIA spoke with, suggesting people who already discredited the lab leak theory as the ones the intelligence community should be talking with.
“It’s not like he’s saying you will go talk to them,” Mr. Erdman said. “It’s just that the bureaucracy in place at the time was perfectly happy to pursue those recommendations.”
The pandemic ripped across the globe in early 2020, dealing death and sending governments scrambling for answers. Schools and businesses were shut down, families were ordered to stay home and treatments were rushed.
The leading public theory was that the virus, first detected in Wuhan, China, leaped from another animal to humans. But the fact that China ran a virus lab — assisted by U.S. taxpayer money — in Wuhan sparked some dissenting voices.
Those voices became louder over time, with the FBI and Energy Department in 2023 leaning toward a lab leak, even as the CIA and the broader intelligence community resisted that.
Mr. Erdman testified in response to a committee subpoena.
CIA Spokeswoman Liz Lyon denounced the hearing, saying the panel “acted in bad faith” by forcing the public testimony. She said Mr. Erdman had already talked to senators in private.
“This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing,” she said. “As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”
But Sen. Rand Paul, the committee’s chairman, said the CIA didn’t publicly back the lab leak until after the 2024 election, as President Biden was headed out the door.
“That is not analysis, that is a clean-up operation,” he said.
Mr. Erdman pointed to a 2022 review by 10 CIA people, including seven subject matter experts, where eight of the 10 leaned toward lab leak. They sent their draft in for review and were told to go back and redo it, with an eye toward new information that had emerged.
The scientists didn’t think the new information changed their conclusions, but they took the mulligan anyway and came back with six of the seven subject matter experts still siding with the lab leak. They sent in their new report, and by the time it came back, it had been changed to say the agency couldn’t identify the origin “precisely.”
“They changed the conclusion,” Mr. Erdman said,
He did, however, refute a 2023 report that the scientists were paid off to change their answers, saying that while they got bonuses later, they weren’t tied to the report.
“There were no bribes,” he said.
Mr. Paul said the result of the suppression was a public denied a chance to have an honest conversation about the virus.
“According to his testimony, CIA scientific analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that a laboratory leak was the most likely origin of COVID-19. Yet those conclusions never shaped the official narrative — and Congress was never told,” the Kentucky Republican said.
Democrats avoided Wednesday’s hearing with the whistleblower, drawing a rebuke from Republicans.
“There’s no curiosity on the other side about what’s happening inside the deep state,” said Sen. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin Republican.
