A Once Fringe Conspiracy Theory Looks More and More Plausible as New Evidence Implicates CIA in Cover-Up of COVID Origins
[Source: newyorker.com]
An unidentified but current senior-level CIA officer told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on September 12 that the CIA offered to pay off analysts with the CIA’s COVID-19 discovery team in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab in Wuhan, China.
According to the whistleblower, the analysts were given Exceptional Performance Awards, along with cash bonuses for coming to the “right” conclusions in their analysis. The right conclusion was that the virus jumped from animals to humans and did not originate in a lab leak.
The whistleblower reported this according to a letter sent on September 12 to CIA Director William Burns by Brad Wenstrup (OH) and Mike Turner (OH), the chairmen of the two congressional committees.
Westrup’s committee additionally determined that Fauci made a secret visit to the CIA during the COVID-19 pandemic and is believed to have pressured analysts to reject the lab leak theory or vice versa since the CIA did not want disclosure of its funding of gain-of-function research designed to make viruses more deadly as part of its biowarfare program..
Wenstrup said that this discovery "lends credence to heightened concerns about the promotion of a false COVID-19 origins narrative by multiple federal government agencies."
Facui had earlier prompted the drafting of a publication, “The Proximal Origin of a Coverup” that would “disprove” the lab leak theory, according to the House Oversight Committee, though after reviewing 8,000 pages of documents and 25 hours of testimony, the committee concluded that the “Proximal Origins” paper employed “fatally flawed science to achieve its goal … to kill the lab leak theory.”
One glaring failure in the paper highlighted by independent scientists was that it failed to mention that one of the virus’ key characteristics—namely the furin cleavage site that makes the spike protein more infectious to humans—had been created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
Funding for an experiment to insert a furin cleavage site into the coronavirus proposed to the Pentagon by Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina (and the “father of Gain-of-Function” research), Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO involved in Gain-of-Function research, and Wuhan lab researcher Shi Zhengli was rejected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Hwever, speculation remains as to whether some of the research was conducted anyways as State Department investigators spoke to two researchers working at a U.S. laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak who said that the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to DARPA.
The CIA whistleblower said Fauci pushed the “Proximal Origin” paper in meetings at the U.S. Department of State and White House to put people off the trail of the lab leak origins.
“Fauci had reasons to push scientists and intelligence analysts to believe the virus had a zoonotic origin since his agency had issued a grant to fund the dangerous research in Wuhan,” according to Peter Gøtzsche, a Danish physician.
Leaked emails reveal that Fauci knew that gain-of-function research was occurring in Wuhan. Fauci admitted in the emails that it was unlikely that the virus “evolved naturally” and it was possible that it was “intentionally inserted.”
Both the Department of Energy and FBI additionally issued reports which gave credence to the lab leak theory.[1] FBI Director Christopher Wray said in early 2023 that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Caught in a Big Lie
Dr. Gøtzsche wrote about released emails and messages revealing that during the July 2023 Congressional hearing on lab origins, top U.S. scientists lied to Congress about their initial concerns the virus was made in the Wuhan lab with funding support from the National Institute of Health (NIH).
Scientists Robert Garry, Ph.D., and Kristian Andersen, Ph.D., two of the authors of the “Proximal Origin” article published in Nature Medicine claiming the virus had zoonotic origins (transmitted from animals to humans), both testified to Congress they believed the virus had emerged from nature.
However, communications since made public show the scientists, both before and after publishing their paper, believed the virus had leaked from a lab.
For example, Andersen wrote on February 1, 2020:
“I think the main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”
This statement, Gøtzsche noted, was one of 60 clear statements made in January and February 2020 among the “Proximal Origin” paper authors expressing their belief that COVID-19 was a bioengineered virus leaked from a lab.
Despite their privately expressed doubts, the authors publicly disparaged the very “lab leak conspiracy theories” they believed. And, Gøtzsche wrote, they actively sought to misinform reporters, including Don McNeil from The New York Times, who was asking “tough questions.”
Andersen told Congress his ideas changed in 2020 based on “many factors, including additional data, analyses, learning more about coronaviruses, and discussions with colleagues and collaborators.”
But released emails show that pressure from Fauci and other “higher ups” led the authors to “abandon the lab-leak theory as implausible,” Gøtzsche wrote.
Fauci then used the Nature Medicine article that he helped to shape in an April 2020 White House press conference as evidence the virus arose naturally.
Politicized Debate
The debate about COVID-19 origins has been heavily politicized, with Republicans being more prone than Democrats to question Fauci and the official explanation for the Coronavirus' origins.
This reason relates in part to the Republicans’ villainization of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) who promoted lockdowns that Republicans felt violated civil liberties.
Donald Trump also referred to the Coronavirus as “kung flu”–playing up the significance of the Wuhan lab to fit with his agenda of demonizing China.
Republicans are generally more prone than Democrats now to cast critical attention on the CIA and “deep state” which they blame for undermining Trump in a clandestine operation.
Democratic Party leaders for their part routinely accuse Republicans of being anti-science and conspiratorial minded and defend Fauci while supporting the official bat origins view along with the idea that vaccines touted by Dr. Fauci were efficient in combating the virus.
Rutgers University historian Jackson Lears told The Guardian that people who consider themselves Democratic party sympathizers and liberals uncritically arrayed themselves against the lab origins theory simply because it was advanced in some variation at one time by Donald Trump.
According to Lears, liberal-democrat support for the bat-origins theory and defense of Anthony Fauci was “a kind of a lockstep reaction against Trump, as in so many matters”–what is known basically as Trump derangement syndrome.
Vindication of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. emerged as one of the most polarizing and maligned figures in the mainstream media during the Coronavirus pandemic after he published The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (New York: Skyhorse, 2021).
This book provided a blistering critique of the medical-industrial pharmaceutical complex and its manipulation of public opinion during the pandemic and Anthony Fauci’s central role in this.
The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus’ revelations combined with the FBI and Department of Energy reports helps vindicate aspects of Kennedy’s book, which determined that COVID-19 was manufactured as a result of unethical gain-of-function research and originated in a laboratory leak.
According to Kennedy, the CIA financed gain-of-function research as part of its bioweapons program through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s PREDICT Project under the cover of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
One of the projects headed by Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health known as the “grandfather” of gain-of-function research, bred pandemic bat coronaviruses that could spread via respiratory droplets in humanized mice.
In another of the animal experiments, scientists had created a highly infectious super-coronavirus with a terrifying kill-rate that in all probability would never have emerged in nature. In just two weeks, the mutant virus killed 6 out of 8 mice and just after the infection, the mice’s human-like lungs were found to contain a viral load up to 10,000 times greater than the original virus.
According to Kennedy, PREDICT laundered its grant through EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO that received more than $118 million in grants from federal agencies to help cure infectious diseases and perform bioweapon research at the Wuhan lab in China.
EcoHealth Alliance was headed by Dr. Peter Daszak, who was identified by whistleblower Andrew G. Huff as having worked for or with the CIA.
According to Peter Gøtzsche, Daszak’s DEFUSE proposal sought funding from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) in 2018 to introduce human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related coronaviruses. Although DARPA declined to fund that research, U.S. investigators reported that Wuhan scientists had then proceeded to do exactly what Daszak’s failed funding application proposed.
“If the SARS-CoV-2 virus had escaped from research Daszak funded, he would be potentially culpable,” Gøtzsche wrote.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wrote that Daszak had a chummy relationship with Dr. Michael Callahan, the head of DARPA’s bioweapons research program and a CIA officer, who co-authored an article in 2015 in the Virology Journal with Daszak and other scientists titled “Diversity of coronavirus in bats From Eastern Thailand.”
When the coronavirus broke out in January 2020, Callahan happened to be just outside Wuhan, location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology where COVID-19 likely originated, visiting under the cover of an appointment by the Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital.
Callahan allegedly told Dr. Robert Malone, a former contractor to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology, that he had been treating “hundreds” of COVID-19 patients before the pandemic was known to the U.S. public.
Subsequently, Dr. Callahan described to National Geographic that he had pored through thousands of case studies at the outbreak’s epicenter and “giddily reported” his amazement at the virus’s “magnificent infectivity” and its “capacity to explode” like “a silent smart bomb in your community.”
Callahan later confessed to Malone that he lacked authority to be in Wuhan and escaped by boat when the government imposed its quarantine. Malone was subsequently warned by Dr. David Hone, a scientist with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), to stop talking about Callahan, saying that “we had no military personnel in Wuhan at the time of the outbreak and Michael was lying about his presence.”
This story told by Kennedy gives indication of a cover-up surrounding the manufacture of COVID-19 through gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab that the senior CIA officer testifying before the House committees on September 12 has helped to further expose.
The Truth About Wuhan
Sampling by Chinese authorities of animals in Wuhan wet markets and in the wild, significantly, found not a single wild animal harboring the SARS-CoV-2 virus, with Wuhan being 1,000 miles away from the nearest wild bats that carry the type of SARS-related coronaviruses that caused the pandemic.
The Wall Street Journal reported based on disclosures by U.S. intelligence that three Wuhan Institute of Virology lab workers had been hospitalized with COVID symptoms in November 2019, significantly before the outbreak at the city’s seafood market.
One of the three lab workers, Ben Hu, a top deputy to Shi Zhengli, got U.S. financial support for risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the traansparency advocacy organization White Coat Waste Project.[2]
The funding came in three grants totaling $41 million, doled out by USAID and NIAID, which was then headed by Dr. Fauci. Hu is listed as an investigator on the grants.
The Times of London reported about activity in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the run-up to the pandemic, similarly sourced to three investigators with the U.S. State Department, which pointed to the Wuhan labs’ collaboration with Chinese military scientists, buttressing what had once been dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory: that the virus was connected to bioweapons research.[3]
Further weight to the lab-manufacture theory comes from Dr. Andrew Huff’s book, The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History (New York: Skyhorse Press, 2022).
It details how, beginning in 2012, Dr. Daszak oversaw development of the biological agent known as SARS-CoV-2 that results in COVID-19 through gain-of-function research funded by USAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
One of the first tasks that Dr. Huff undertook while working at EcoHealth Alliance was to review an NIH proposal titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” written by Dr. Daszak with Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and some other scientists.
The proposal advocated studying people in rural China who may have come into contact with bats that spread the coronavirus among humans and to screen for the virus with the goal of being able to better predict coronavirus transmission. It further aimed to develop new coronavirus strains and perform experiments that would enhance the ability of bat coronavirus to infect human cells and laboratory animals using techniques of genetic engineering.
On October 17, 2014, an Executive Order by President Obama declared a moratorium on gain-of-function research, which was lifted by the Trump administration in December 2017.
Before that, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 until his retirement in December 2022, secretly outsourced gain-of-function research to China’s Wuhan lab and licensed the lab to continue receiving U.S. government funding. A $3.7 million grant was provided by Dr. Fauci to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the NIAID to restart the coronavirus bat project.
By trying to make bats capable of infecting human cells, Huff came to believe that his employer was involved not only in unethical gain-of-function but also bioweapons research whose end result, he said, was “the creation of SARS-CoV-2,” which “causes the disease known as COVID-19.”
Huff discovered, suspiciously, that someone edited the NIH proposal after it was submitted on April 15, 2014; he also observed heavy micromanagement of the project by USAID personnel, U.S. Embassy staff, and other employees of the State Department. [4]
A leading subcontractor was Metabiota, which was partially owned by Rosemont Seneca, a venture capital firm partially owned by Hunter Biden and the CIA’s proprietary venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, which invests in companies that make technology of national security interest.
The involvement of the above companies embody the pharmaceutical industry and investor world’s capture by the Pentagon and military intelligence agencies, according to Sasha Latypova, a former pharmaceutical industry executive. “A lot of money [pretends] to be venture funds while actually being funded by CIA,” Latypova says.
Lab Leak Theory Only Credible Explanation
In an effort to gain further information on the CIA, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is seeking to interview Andrew Makridis, the former CIA chief operating officer who coordinated the Agency’s response to COVID-19 until his retirement at the end of 2022 and “played a central role” in the CIA’s COVID investigation.
The New York Post reported that, in June, the U.S. intelligence community declassified its 10-page report on COVID origins, which found “biosafety concerns” and “genetic engineering” taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” though it said that most of its “agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.”
Several scientists at the Wuhan lab, however, became sick in the fall of 2019 with symptoms “consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19,” the report states.
Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, in an essay on the COVID-19 coverup, cited a 2023 investigation that found the first three people infected by the virus and admitted to the hospital all worked at the Wuhan lab, where they did gain-of-function research.
On April 18, 2023, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a hearing that the so-called “lab leak theory” was the “only” credible explanation for the pandemic.
“My informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government’s intelligence…has been and continues to be that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense,” Ratcliffe told the House Select Subcommittee.
“If our intelligence and evidence supporting a lab leak was placed side by side with our intelligence and evidence pointing to a natural origins or spillover theory, the lab leak side of the ledger would be long, convincing, even overwhelming—while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous,” added Ratcliffe.
Pillar of Shame
In July 2021, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a letter organized by Peter Daszak to “condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” Daszak also worked behind the scenes to stop colleagues involved with the research from signing the letter in order to obscure their connection.
Daszak was eventually called out by a group of scientists known as the Paris Group, who urged the NIH and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to remove him because he “withheld critical information and misled public opinion by expressing falsehoods.”[5]
Despite revelations showing Daszak’s involvement, Gøtzsche said social media companies’ “fact checkers” continued to cite the Nature Medicine paper and the letter in The Lancet to censor as “misinformation” posts that characterized the lab-leak theory as plausible.
Based on all of this, Gøtzsche concluded that “The cover-up of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is the worst in medical history. This will stand as a pillar of shame in the coming centuries.”
The shame extends to the Chinese military, which also played a role in the cover-up. according to Gøtzsche.
It had funded gain-of-function research with the goal of producing bioweapons.
One of the Chinese military researchers, Zhou Yusen, produced a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in February 2020, “with remarkable speed.” He died mysteriously in May 2020, Gøtzsche wrote, reportedly having been thrown from the roof of the Wuhan Institute.
Who killed Mr. Yusen is uncertain—it could have been those who planned to profit from mRNA vaccines.
Ukraine Biolabs and Ft. Detrick
The Congressional investigation should extend to Ft. Detrick and Ukraine biolabs where it has been claimed by multiple sources that SARS-COV-2 was created months before it emerged in Wuhan.
According to Russian documents that were presented to the UN, there is evidence that the Ukraine biolabs were also creating genome-specific varieties of infectious diseases, including COVID.
Since the biolabs exist for both offensive and defensive purposes, how better to supervise and gather intelligence on a U.S. project than to participate directly in it, even offering the facilities? Especially a country at war with your own.
Recall the Wuhan military games, that involved U.S. forces (from Ft. Detrick where a leak occurred in September 2019 that led to a lab shutdown) held in October 2019, prior to the outbreak in Wuhan.
Many questions remain and it would require a high level of transparency on behalf of many nations to get to the full truth given that the primary objective of U.S. intelligence is not truth, but narrative control.
[1] Back in 2021, The Intercept consulted 11 scientists who are virologists or work in adjacent fields and hold a range of views on both the ethics of gain-of-function research and the Covid-19 origins search. Seven said that the work appears to meet NIH’s criteria for gain-of-function research.
[2] The other two workers were identified by Michael Shellinberger and Matt Taibbi as Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
[3] “In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army,” the Times reported. “In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.”
[4] Huff told Fox Business in January: “This was actually a failed intelligence operation. We were actually trading China advanced biotechnology for access to and collect intelligence on their bioweapons laboratory.”
[5] The Paris Group cited a tweet where Daszak claimed the Chinese labs he worked with had never kept live bats, even though by the Wuhan scientists’ own accounts, live bats were present at the facility since at least 2009.