The Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, new whistleblower testimony to Congress alleges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A senior-level CIA officer told House committee leaders that his agency tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in a Wuhan lab if they changed their position and said the virus jumped from animals to humans, according to a letter sent Tuesday to CIA Director William Burns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) requested all documents, communications and pay info from the CIA\u2019s COVID Discovery Team by Sept. 26.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAccording 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,\u201d the House panel chairmen wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe seventh member of the Team, who also happened to be the most senior, was the lone officer to believe COVID-19 originated through zoonosis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d they said, noting that the analysts were \u201cexperienced officers with significant scientific expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Wenstrup and Turner also asked for documents and communications between the CIA and other federal agencies, including the State Department, the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Energy Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a separate letter, the House committee leaders identified former CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis as having \u201cplayed a central role\u201d in the COVID investigation and asked him to sit for a transcribed interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAt CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions,\u201d CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp told The Post in a statement. \u201cWe take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Makridis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The FBI was the first US intelligence agency to conclude the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated with a lab leak. In February, the Energy Department also concluded a lab leak was likely, based on new intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The US intelligence community declassified its 10-page reporton COVID origins in June, which found \u201cbiosafety concerns\u201d and \u201cgenetic engineering\u201d taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but most of its \u201cagencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Several scientists at the Wuhan lab also became sick in the fall of 2019 with symptoms \u201cconsistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19,\u201d the report states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The CIA and one other intelligence agency \u201cremain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,\u201d it says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But some former US intelligence officials have disagreed with the assessment. In April, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Congress that the so-called \u201clab leak theory\u201d was the \u201conly\u201d credible explanation for the pandemic, which has since claimed the lives of nearly 7 million people across the globe, according to the World Health Organization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy informed assessment as a person with as much access as anyone to our government\u2019s intelligence \u2026 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,\u201d Ratcliffe told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a hearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf 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 \u2014 while the spillover side would be nearly empty and tenuous,\u201d added Ratcliffe, a former Texas Republican congressman who served as President Donald Trump\u2019s second and last director of national intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Central Intelligence Agency offered to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, new whistleblower testimony to Congress alleges. A senior-level CIA officer told House committee leaders that his agency tried to pay off six analysts who found SARS-CoV-2 likely originated in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,26],"class_list":["post-58","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-cia","tag-covid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60,"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/60"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hkg01.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}