Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

The Covid lab leak theory is back in the news, with a CIA whistleblower alleging this week the agency bribed its own analysts to bury the truth.

Six analysts were offered bribes by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to “conclude” that Covid-19 did not originate in a Wuhan lab, according to a whistleblower from the agency.

The bombshell revelation was made in a letter to the CIA Director from two congressional committees tasked with investigating the origins of the virus that plunged the world into chaos for two years.

“Significant monetary incentive” was offered to six of seven members on a CIA Covid Discovery Team who, at the end of their investigation, believed the virus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the letter explains.

The analysts were bribed to “change their position” and claim they were “unable to determine” the origins of the virus, according to the whistleblower, whom the committees described as a “multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer”.

If the allegations are true, bribing its own analysts is how the CIA justified telling the American public it was uncertain if Covid leaked from the Wuhan facility known to be undertaking risky gain-of-function research unwittingly funded by U.S. taxpayers.

The New York Post, the Daily Mail, Newsweek, Fox News, Science and many other legacy outlets have provided coverage of the sensational leak.

CIA Records Requested, Agency Head to be Interviewed

The letter to CIA Director William Burns was penned by Republican congressmen Mike Turner and Brad Wenstrup, both from Ohio, who lead the Intelligence and Covid committees respectively. They informed Burns:

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 that 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 one 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.

Turner and Wenstrup have asked the CIA to turn over all records about “the pay history, to include the awarding of any type of financial or performance-based incentive/financial bonus to members of all iterations of the COVID Discovery Teams”.

They have also requested all CIA communications with the FBI, State Department, Health and Human Services and Energy Department about the matter. The committees set a deadline of 26 September to turn over the documents and have threatened the CIA with subpoenas if they do not comply.

In a seperate letter, Turner and Wenstrup identified former CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis as playing “a central role” in the Covid origins investigation. Until his retirement last year, Makridis was the number three official at the CIA coordinating his agency’s response to Covid.

The committees have asked Makridis to sit for a “voluntary transcribed interview” on 26 September.

Covid Lab Leak ‘Plausible’: Intelligence Agencies

Predictably, the CIA has denied the whistleblower’s allegations.

In a statement, CIA spokesperson Tammy Kupperman Thorp said, “At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity, and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions. We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.”

The CIA is one of two intelligence agencies that remains “unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to a declassified report from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence released in June.

The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) both believe that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the report states, while five agencies assess a natural origin for the virus.

“All agencies continue to assess that both a natural and laboratory-associated origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection,” according to the declassified report.

More Damning Covid Lab Leak Revelations

The CIA whistleblower’s testimony is consistent with other recent revelations about the Covid lab leak hypothesis.

In August, Congress obtained subpoenaed documents showing that five scientists who publicly rubbished the Covid lab leak hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory” privately feared the virus came from the Wuhan lab.

Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes and Robert F. Garry co-authored ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’, published in Nature Medicine in March 2020.

Their paper enjoyed six million views. Journalists the world over cited it thousands of times to bolster the popular view that Covid-19 originated in the wet markets of Wuhan. Facebook and other social media platforms used Proximal Origin to justify censoring anyone who supported the lab leak theory. For over a year, those who believed Covid-19 leaked from a lab were labelled racists and right-wing extremists.

But the paper, still available on Nature Medicine’s website today, turned out to be a sham. 

In their private communications, all five men privately conceded the Covid lab leak theory was a plausible explanation for the origins of the virus.

This followed another bombshell revelation: that Dr Anthony Fauci, then chief medical advisor to President Donald Trump, was the one to commission Proximal Origin, even while pretending in public it was an independent study.

Fauci had all the motive in the world to scuttle the lab leak theory: for years in his role as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he funnelled millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund the gain-of-function research that was taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In July, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky announced an official criminal referral to the Department of Justice for Dr Anthony Fauci.

Image via Unsplash.