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 and then punished the analysts who tried to push back, an agency whistleblower told Congress on Wednesday.
As early as Aug. 12, 2021, the agency was considering publicly calling the virus a lab leak. Five days later, that changed, and the CIA refused to say why, said James Erdman III, a career CIA operations officer who just completed a study of COVID-19 for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
He said that some in the CIA seemed too eager to make excuses for China and that some antipathy toward President Trump may have fueled the agency’s resistance to the possibility that the virus originated at 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.”
“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 toxic cycle of cross-pollination: scientists getting government funding for their research and then being called in to serve as experts when the government goes looking for answers after something goes wrong.
That included Dr. Fauci, who, he said, was shaping the experts the CIA spoke with, suggesting that people who had already discredited the lab-leak theory were 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 around 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 prevailing 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 in Wuhan — assisted by U.S. taxpayer money — sparked dissent.
Those voices grew over time. In 2023, the FBI and the Energy Department leaned toward a lab leak, even as the CIA and the broader intelligence community resisted that view.
Mr. Erdman testified in response to a committee subpoena.
CIA spokesperson Liz Lyon denounced the hearing. She said the committee “acted in bad faith” by forcing public testimony and that Mr. Erdman had already spoken with senators privately.
“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.”
Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican and the committee’s chairman, said the CIA did not publicly support the lab-leak theory until after the 2024 election, as President Biden was headed out the door.
“That is not analysis, that is a cleanup operation,” he said.
Mr. Erdman pointed to a 2022 review by 10 CIA personnel, including seven subject matter experts, in which eight of the 10 leaned toward a lab leak. They submitted their draft for review and were told to go back and revise it, with an eye toward new information that had emerged.
The scientists maintained that the new information did not alter their findings; however, they complied with the request for a secondary review, only to find that six of the seven subject matter experts continued to support the lab-leak theory. They submitted their new report, and by the time it was finalized, it had been changed to say the agency could not identify the origin “precisely.”
“They changed the conclusion,” Mr. Erdman said.
He did, however, dispute a 2023 report that the scientists were paid off to change their answers, saying that although the scientists later received bonuses, the payments were not tied to the report.
“There were no bribes,” he said.
Mr. Paul said the result of the suppression was that the public was denied the 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,” he said.
Democrats avoided the whistleblower hearing, 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.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.