An explosive revelation about the alleged effort to conceal the origins of the COVID-19 virus has emerged. House Coronavirus Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner sent letters to CIA Director William Burns and former CIA Chief Operating Officer Andrew Makridis detailing allegations from a whistleblower that the agency offered a team of officials a “significant monetary incentive” to change their positions that the virus came from a leak out of a lab in Wuhan, China.
The letter to Burns noted:
A multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer has come forward to provide information to the Committees regarding the Agency’s analysis into the origins of COVID-19. According to the whistleblower, the Agency assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team (Team). The Team consisted of multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.
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.
In both letters, the lawmakers noted that these credible allegations “requires the Committees to conduct further oversight of how the CIA handled its internal investigations into the origins of COVID-19.”
The representatives requested that the agency provide a series of documents related to the matter by “no later than September 26, 2023.”
Wenstrup and Turner, in their message to Makridis, noted that the whistleblower claimed to have “played a central role in [the team’s] formation and eventual conclusion that the CIA was unable to determine the origins of COVID-19.”
In April, the former Director of National Intelligence affirmed that the government believes the coronavirus was leaked from a Wuhan lab. RedState’s Jennifer Van Laar reported:
During the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic hearing on Capitol Hill Tuesday, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) John Ratcliffe testified that “a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science, and by common sense.”
Ratcliffe’s sworn testimony comes the morning after reports that a new Senate report concluded that the leak happened earlier than first thought, and that US-funded virus weaponization was taking place in Wuhan. As Bonchie covered Tuesday morning:
“This report concludes most likely this was two leaks,” Marshall said during a briefing with reporters ahead of the release of the report. “The possibility of a lab leak in the September-October [2019] time frame, even as early as July or August, was followed by vaccine development in November 2019. And then another lab leak seems to be the most sensible explanation in this retrospective review.”
The obvious question is: If this is true, why would the CIA or any other federal agency deign to offer a substantial financial incentive to change the team’s official stance on the origins of the pandemic?
To put it plainly, this would constitute an egregious breach of integrity that could carry tremendous political and public repercussions while also further diminishing the already-dwindling trust Americans have in their government institutions. The notion that the CIA would offer to pay officials to conceal such important information about a pandemic that essentially locked the country down for two years should be disturbing to any American, regardless of political affiliation.
Moreover, the fact that the lawmakers are requesting such extensive documentation, under the threat of subpoena, seems to suggest that there might be fire to accompany this smoke. Indeed, it is even possible that this attempted coverup could involve other federal agencies.
If the whistleblower’s allegations hold, there could be monumental ramifications. It would mean that, once again, the government has worked to prevent the public from knowing critical information about an issue that has affected millions of American lives.
You can read the letters below:
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