The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offered to pay analysts to cover up the fact that COVID-19 most likely resulted from a biological lab leak in Wuhan, China, according to a new testimony from a whistleblower.
In testimony before the House of Representative, a senior-level official at the CIA told committee staffers that the CIA approached six of its own analysts who concluded that SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a lab and offered to pay them significant amounts of money to say the virus originated from zoonosis — the imparting of a disease from animals to humans — instead.
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The committee leaders, namely Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH), demanded that the CIA’s COVID discovery team hand over all documents, communications, and payment receipts by Sep. 26.
The request was made in a letter sent to CIA Director William J. Burns:
The chairmen also asked for documents and communications between the CIA and federal agencies such as the Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Department of Energy.
In an official statement on the matter, Wenstrup and Turner wrote:
According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed the intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis. 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.
The committee chairmen also requested CIA Chief Operating Officer (COO) Andrew Makridis come in for a transcribed interview. Makridis was selected due to the significant role he played in the Agency’s COVID investigation.
“At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions,” CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp told The New York Post. “We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.”
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