CIA whistleblower alleges ‘significant monetary incentives’ for officials to dismiss Covid-19 ‘lab leak’ theory

A CIA whistleblower alleges before a congressional committee that the US intelligence agency offered six officials ‘significant monetary incentives’ to change their position on Covid’s origin.

Congressional committees tasked with investigating the origin of Covid-19 have released a letter sent to CIA director William Burns, pictured, demanding information related to a seven-person committee the intelligence agency had formed to investigate the origin of the virus. Picture: AFP

The CIA gave six of its own intelligence officers “significant monetary incentives” to jettison the possibility SARS-Cov2, the virus that causes Covid-19, leaked from a lab in Wuhan China, according to explosive allegations from a “seemingly credible” CIA whistleblower.

Congressional committees tasked with investigating the origin of Covid-19 on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST) released a letter they had sent to CIA director William Burns demanding information related to a seven-person committee the intelligence agency had formed to investigate the origin of the virus.

Brad Westrup and Mike Turner, Republican chairmen of the House of Representatives subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic and Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, respectively, said the whistleblower, whose name hasn’t been released, was a “multi-decade, senior-level office” still employed by the CIA.

“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 letter said.

“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,” it went on, referring to the CIA’s Covid Discovery Team.

“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.”

The allegations will renew scrutiny of the scientific and political decision making surrounding the origin of the virus and follow the emergence of private communication among scientists in early 2020 that appeared to suggest an influential group of scientists who had publicly ruled out a lab leak harboured greater doubt privately.

US intelligence agencies remain publicly split over whether the lab leak or natural emergencies theories is the more likely explanation for the virus, which contributed to the deaths of around 7 million people since emerging in China in late 2019.

The FBI and the Department of Energy have concluded a lab leak was more likely, while five other agencies among a dozen believed zoonosis was more likely. The CIA and one other were unable to make a conclusion either way.

“At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigour, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions,” CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp told The New York Post in a statement.

“We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.”

Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and professor at Rutgers University who has followed the evidence on the virus’s origins closely, told The Australian last month he was frustrated the White House had not fully declassified its intelligence related to the origin of Covid, despite a law passed in March requiring it.

“If these new allegations are correct and verifiable, then there has been a violation of law and a breach of public trust that would necessitate accountability at every level, up to, at minimum, the level of the CIA Director and the Director of National Intelligence,” he told The Australian.

It comes after The Australian last month reported scientists at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence (DIA NCMI) had conducted rigorous research on the genomic sequence of the virus and firmly concluded that it was, most likely, a laboratory construct. But the final report by US President Joe Biden’s 90-day probe into the origins of Covid-19 censored the input of intelligence agency scientists who concluded the virus was most likely genetically engineered.

The US intelligence community declassified a 10-page report on Covid origins in June, which found “biosafety concerns” and “genetic engineering” had occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it stopped short of suggesting SARS-CoV-2 itself was engineered, as some scientists believe.

Australian journalist Sharri Markson provided evidence in The Weekend Australian Magazine in July that SARS-Cov2 may have emerged accidentally as result of Chinese government research into coronavirus vaccines, based on interviews with former US assistant health secretary Robert Kadlec.