CIA tried to pay off analysts to bury COVID lab leak findings: whistleblower
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • last year • 41 commentsBy: Josh Christenson (New York Post)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
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 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.
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's COVID Discovery Team by Sept. 26.
"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 House panel chairmen wrote.
The CIA offered to pay off analysts in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, according to a letter sent to Director William Burns.Getty Images 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.REUTERS
"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," they said, noting that the analysts were "experienced officers with significant scientific expertise."
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.
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In a separate letter, the House committee leaders identified former CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis as having "played a central role" in the COVID investigation and asked him to sit for a transcribed interview.
"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 Post in a statement. "We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed."
Makridis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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.
In a separate letter, the House committee leaders identified former CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis as having "played a central role" in the probe and asked to interview him.
The US intelligence community declassified its 10-page reporton COVID origins in June, which found "biosafety concerns" and "genetic engineering" taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but most of its "agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered."
Several scientists at the Wuhan lab also became sick in the fall of 2019 with symptoms "consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19," the report states.
The CIA and one other intelligence agency "remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting," it says.
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) in the letter requested all documents, communications and pay information from the CIA.AP Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) in the letter said the analysts were "experienced officers with significant scientific expertise."Getty Images
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 "lab leak theory" was the "only" 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.
"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 on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a hearing.
"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, a former Texas Republican congressman who served as President Donald Trump's second and last director of national intelligence.
In April, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Congress that the so-called "lab leak theory" was the "only" credible explanation for the pandemic.AP
As the former number three official at the CIA during the pandemic, Makridis coordinated his agency's response to COVID before retiring in 2022.
He now serves as a senior adviser at Beacon Global Strategies.
The strategic advisory firm also says on its website that he spent "over a decade in the Directorate of Intelligence working and then leading the technical analysis of Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean strategic weapons and space capabilities."
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This is the reason the country is so bitterly divided.
It is the disconnect between the leftist ideologues and their extremely radical ideas who run all our institutions and the beliefs of traditional Americans.
Imagine the CIA trying to kill the idea the virus was man-made!
Not really, look no further than your second sentence.
Thanks for noticing.
ain't that the truth...
Extremism is the reason we are so bitterly divided, like when you believe the CIA is run by leftist ideologues.
Wow. let's hope the rot isn't that thorough.
The truth about where it came from is coming out
At a snail's pace.
Better late than never! There are already rumblings of masking up children and adults again.
Also, "boosters" for 6-month-old babies who never had the original 2 doses.
The newest vaccine boosters (again Pfizer and Moderna): one has only been tested on mice, and the other on only 50 humans. Yep ... sign me up ... NOT!
It won't be that easy this time. We have recently learned how much they didn't know.
There is no “truth” here, just more speculation. A low confidence assessment is not “truth”. If you really want to have the best idea where the virus came from you will have to ask the Chinese government, and good luck getting anything believable out of them.
This does explain how trump was able to come up with a vaccine in only 7 months. Obviously Fauci wouldn't develop a Bio weapon without first making sure he had a vaccine.
I think the historians will write the final chapter of Anthony Fauci.
It should be a jury of his peers.
I'd like to see a jury comprised of all those who lost somebody to covid.
Seeing as historians have yet to write the final chapter on anything you might want to go back to square one when it comes to thinking about anything.
Seeing as you thought I was comparing myself to Earnest Hemingway, it might be time for you to hang it up.
All thanks, or should I say, no thanks to the former 'president' as it is because of him that so many died.
Research on MRA's was already 10 years old, it would not have mattered who was president.
Of course not, unless you are a liberal and then Joe Biden gets all the credit. Don't you have a black faced wearing racist piece of shit liberal running your country also? is that why you support Joe Biden? he reminds you of an extremely old senile version of Grand Wizard Trudeau.
As I stated, the credit goes back 10+ years and the simplest research will point you to a dozen or so women virologists.
Justin Trudeau? Never voted for him nor supported him, he's a shallow shadow of his father.
Ah, an opinion I have stated many times, and now also said by another discerning Canadian.
We will get no respect until we add 4 canoes to our navy of 5 kayaks and 1 dredged up barge.
My brother was in the navy and he did cross the Atlantic in a frigate, so you can add that to the fleet.
I credit the scientists who developed the vaccine, no one else.
I can't believe anyone would give credit to the former 'president' for anything. If it hadn't lied and suppressed how deadly it was, we would have never reached pandemic status IMHO
SNOPES
LINK ->
What I think is the attempted payoff was because the CIA KNEW that pinning the virus on a lab leak wasn't verifiable, and it was an embarrassment to them and the DOE and the FBI that such a story was indicated to be "most likely", when what it REALLY was was just a way to disparage and humiliate China. Personally, I buy the "conclusion" from SNOPES that I quoted in my previous comment, notwithstanding the attempts by some to establish otherwise. In other words, nothing has been proven yet, and that's where it stands.
Do you think that was the reason? It wouldn't be to save Dr Fauci?
Who knows? Whatever. However I can smell it all the way here.
Do your homework and research. Your information is out of date.
The virus was the product of gain-of-function by the Chinese government, aided and abetted and supported by Fauci.
Up until now I never considered putting any NT member on ignore, but now I'm reconsidering.
That is word for word what the Q-folk always say.
Honestly, I am completely over the origin of the virus. I really just don’t care anymore and it really doesn’t matter, the motherfucker is here to stay. If anyone REALLY knows its origin they work for the Chinese government, which means we will never really know.
Our focus now needs to be on managing it on a yearly basis as best we can.
Smart idea. Some folks here are a complete waste of time to deal with.
You have a lot of nerve having a common sense attitude and posting a common sense comment on this topic.
There are times I have absolutely no patience for idiots.
I certainly don’t know the facts on the origin of COVID. But I think that it is increasingly clear that China has been opaque with the World Health Organization and others on their information on key data about the origins of the Covid which put the world in jeopardy.
This lack of data disclosure is inexcusable and says a lot about China’s lack of responsibility as a world leader. They are willing to sacrifice international health safety for national political interests.
Exactly. We will never really know much as long as the Chinese government continues to stonewall on what they know, which they will continue to do. Until they are transparent with their info anything else is more or less speculation.
And so it's no better than a waste of time to keep speculating and blaming.