Lab-Leak Evidence Allegedly Scrubbed from CIA Reports
A Senate Homeland Security Committee last week heard explosive allegations from a CIA whistleblower that former NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci orchestrated a wide-ranging cover-up of Covid-19 origins, in collaboration with various federal intelligence agencies.
CIA Officer James Erdman said Fauci improperly “influenced” a probe into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic — inserting himself into high-level scientific debate to downplay findings that the pandemic most likely resulted from a laboratory accident in China.
Erdman came forward “at great personal risk” because “the truth was being buried,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said last Wednesday, describing the whistleblower as “an officer with decades of intelligence and national security experience.”
Erdman and an elite team from the Department of National Intelligence spent a year tracing how the intelligence community (IC) had arrived at their conclusions of “a natural cause” –the belief that the virus evolved by itself. These findings, Erdman told the Senate panel, ran counter to the actual conclusions reached by objective experts.
“According to Officer Erdman’s testimony, CIA analysts concluded multiple times between 2021 and 2023 that a lab leak was the most likely origin of Covid-19,” Sen. Paul said in his opening statement. “Yet those conclusions never shaped the official narrative; they never made it into the intelligence report. Congress was never told.”
“It was not until after the 2024 election that the outgoing Biden administration produced an assessment on the origins of the pandemic. Not because of new intelligence, but so officials could walk out the door claiming there was nothing left to find,” the senator said.
For this assessment, “the CIA released a skimpy 9-page, partially redacted summary of already released intelligence,” Erdman told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
“That is not analysis. That is a cleanup operation,” said Sen. Paul in his statement.
The Secret Teleconference
Erdman testified that Fauci seized two critical moments– once on Feb. 3, 2020, and again on June 4, 2021—to promote the natural origins theory about the pandemic’s outbreak.
“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” Erdman testified, saying the then-director of NIAID meddled in Covid-origins analyses by providing a list of “approved experts and scientists” to the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Not surprisingly, that list included several scientists who had joined a secret February 2020 teleconference with Fauci that ultimately produced an authoritative scientific paper, Proximal Origins of SAR COV-2.
This document, which carried enormous weight in the scientific community, promoted the view that the virus evolved naturally, while discrediting the notion that it had been created in a lab. It was treated by the establishment and the media as an undisputed article of faith not to be questioned.
A host of FOIA-released emails documenting conversations between Fauci and others, however, told a different story.
The emails recorded the prior concerns of some of the scientists on the teleconference that the virus showed signs of having been manipulated by human hands. These concerns had apparently been suppressed as they were at odds with the views later expressed in Proximal Origins of SAR COV-2.
A June 2021 Yated article, Fauci Emails Boost Suspicions of Wuhan Lab Leak, detailed the bizarre sequence in which prominent scientists initially wrote emails suggesting the pandemic likely stemmed from a lab accident involving a manipulated virus, only to reverse themselves days later and publicly embrace the claim that the virus originated in nature.
“From the declassified emails, it appears this switch was spearheaded by Fauci himself but also involved his boss, former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, as well as Jeremy Farrar, the head of the British Wellcome Trust,” the article said.
In addition, the article noted that at least three of the experts on the teleconference subsequently received generous NIAID research grants awarded by Director Fauci.
“Some of the scientists were part of the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), an advisory body whose members often receive considerable funding from NIAID and public health agencies,” Erdman confirmed last week.
With the media protecting the Biden administration elites, the story of subterfuge and cover-up had no traction back in 2021. Today, five years later, these revelations, coming at the same time as major shakeups at NIH, are dominating headlines. [See Sidebar]
Fauci’s Cronies Helped Him Redefine Gain-of-Function
Strikingly, several scientist allies allegedly helped Fauci rewrite the definition of gain-of-function in 2015, in an effort to lift a funding pause on dangerous experiments, Erdman told the Senate panel.
Gain-of-function is an innocent-sounding laboratory process that genetically manipulates a virus, and can increase its transmissibility and toxicity. The professed aim of such dangerous work is to develop vaccines to combat these viruses should they ever spontaneously “appear” and threaten humanity.
The key flaw in this argument, critics say, is obvious: creating pathogens that don’t exist in nature risks unleashing them and causing a pandemic. In addition, decades of virus-manipulation have been fruitless, as no human vaccine has ever been developed in advance of a human epidemic.
The technique is risky because it can be used to alter a virus into a bioweapon. It is also illegal in this country.
The Fauci-revised definition said gain-of-function applied to scientific experimentation that the scientist knew with reasonable certainty, in advance, would produce a more infectious and harmful mutation.
According to this tortured logic, even when viruses in fact become more dangerous after the experiment succeeds, as long as the outcome was not fully predicted, the process can’t be defined as gain-of-function.
This ludicrous re-definition enabled Fauci to insist with a straight face, under Congressional questioning, that he had never funded gain-of-function research. After all, he couldn’t possibly know in advance—with absolute certainty—what the experiments would produce, could he?
As reported in a July 2022 Yated article, Fauci responded with outrage when accused of lying to Congress about his role in the forbidden research.
Sen. Paul: Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11, where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?
Dr. Fauci: Senator Paul, I have never lied before Congress and I do not retract that statement! The paper that you were referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.
Sen. Paul: You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?
Dr. Fauci: Yeah, that is correct and Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about!
Pressure from critics and activists in the Obama administration brought about a temporary pause on funding gain-of-function research, especially when it involved potential pathogens of a deadly nature.
“But five months before the moratorium was announced, EcoHealth, under Fauci chum Peter Daszak, secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million under the wire,” according to a Nov 2024 Yated article headlined, “Revelations From the Great Covid Cover-up.”
Daszak, with Fauci’s approval, allocated the money to various labs engaged in collecting bat samples and performing gain-of-function experiments, including China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Exposed As a Fraud
Fauci’s testimony denying his role in funding gain-of-function subsequently collapsed under the weight of government documents, congressional testimony, and eventual admissions from NIH leadership itself.
Eventually, it was confirmed that U.S. taxpayer dollars flowed through EcoHealth Alliance into Wuhan, where coronavirus gain-of-function experiments took place. With few exceptions, these shocking revelations were ignored or downplayed by the media, keeping Americans in the dark about the life and death gambles playing out under the rubric of science.
Back in October 2021, Yated reported that government documents implicating the NIH in the funding of “gain-of-function” experiments at Wuhan had surfaced, forcing NIH director Francis Collins to abruptly announce his resignation.
“Records obtained by a FOIA request from the group DRASTIC, a team of scientists investigating the origins of Covid-19, exposed both Collins’ and Fauci’s pronouncements as false,” the article said.
“Among the documents are records of NIH grants for gain-of-function research in Wuhan, as well as progress reports that outlined the exact experiments carried out with the help of the grants,” the article noted.
Echoes of the Deep State
In his testimony to the Senate Committee, Erdman accused the Intelligence Community (CIA) of withholding as many as 2,000 pages of classified material on Covid origins — in violation of a 2023 law signed by former President Biden ordering disclosures to the American public.
When asked whether intelligence officials were deliberately trying to protect China, Erdman testified that motivations were difficult to determine. But he described a culture inside parts of the intelligence community that was deeply resistant to favoring a laboratory origin. [See Sidebar]
“Nobody wanted the lab leak conclusion,” Erdman said, speculating that this attitude was apparently driven by the fear of gain-of-function research being linked to the pandemic.
In 2022 and 2023, the CIA conducted a Covid revisit, and “retaliated against analysts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis,” Erdman says. They allegedly took action particularly against those who refused to agree with “management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite of the analysis.
The revised version “changed the assessment that had pointed to a lab accident to a conclusion of ‘we can’t be sure,’” Erdman testified.
He went on to catalogue other instances in which the CIA sabotaged orders from Congress, covertly following its own agenda in line with the nature of a “deep state.”
“In 2023, Congress unanimously passed legislation requiring the Office of National Intelligence to release the intelligence community’s findings on the origins of Covid. In response to that law, the Biden administration released a pathetic 9-page summary of already known intelligence,” Erdman told the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
“The deep state still resists the congressional mandate” to release documents on Covid’s origins, said Sen. Rand Paul at last week’s hearing.
Erdman said in his testimony that under its new director, National Intelligence is in the process of declassifying some 2,000 documents related to Covid’s origins. That work has been slowed, he said, by the CIA and State Department refusing to turn over requested documents.
Running Down the Clock on Accountability
Following Erdman’s testimony, several GOP lawmakers called for Fauci to face criminal prosecution for allegedly seeking to suppress the origins of Covid-19.
“We just heard testimony that Fauci intervened behind the scenes to try and get our own intelligence agencies–CIA, FBI—to change their assessment of the lab leak,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told Fox News. “Why? Because he helped fund the Wuhan lab. He supported and funded gain-of-function research, and then he tried to cover it up, and then he worked to cover it up from the American people.”
“I hope he’s indicted,” Hawley added.
The hearing last Wednesday came after a statute of limitations deadline for Fauci to face criminal charges regarding false testimony passed earlier this week. In addition, the former NIAID director was given a presidential pre-emptive pardon by former President Biden in his final hours in office.
President Trump has said the ‘autopen’ pardons issued by the Biden administration are not legally binding but has so far not challenged them in court.
“Whether the DOJ decides to charge Fauci or not, I’m not letting up,” Sen. Paul wrote on social media Monday.
“Never has one arrogant bureaucrat destroyed more people’s lives,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas posted online.
“Never in the history of the public-health profession has anyone been so richly rewarded for doing so much harm to the public’s health,” a NY Post editorial asserted. “In addition to funding dangerous research in the Chinese lab that may have created the coronavirus — he promoted a series of harmful policies in America and throughout the world, including suppression of early treatment and the catastrophe of universal vaccine mandates, that did even more damage than the virus.
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A Reckoning (of Sorts)
A moment of reckoning quietly appeared last week in Nature— the prestigious British science journal (that spent four years insisting the lab leak theory was a dangerous conspiracy). “NIH Ousts Infectious-disease Leaders as Covid Scientists face U.S. charges,” the headline read.
In what appears to be a top-to-bottom removal of key individuals who ran NIAID, three more senior officials at the department were fired last week, including acting director Jeffrey Taubenberger.
This brings to eight the number of top officials fired or pressured to resign from the federal agency once led by Anthony Fauci during his nearly five-decade tenure.
Fauci is long gone. Now, most of his allies who carried out his agenda are on their way out. According to the Nature article, some of these individuals, besides losing their jobs, are facing criminal prosecutions as well.
Fauci might have gotten an Autopen pardon. But his cronies and underlings did not.
Already in April, the DOJ criminally indicted David Morens, a ‘senior adviser’ to Fauci from 2006 through 2022. He was charged with conspiracy against the United States, destruction and falsification of federal records— all connected to a scheme which he boasted to his colleagues would block his email communications about Wuhan research grants from FOIA requests.
In a striking admission that constitutes the indictment’s “Exhibit A,” Morens said he had learned the tactic of how to fool the government from the in-house FOIA officer.
“I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I am FOIA’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe,” he wrote.
In another incriminating email, after EcoHealth won a new $7.5 million grant from NIAID, Morens who worked for NIAID director Fauci and apparently thought he deserved a cut, wrote to EcoHealth CEO Peter Daszak: “Ahem…. So much money!! Do I get a kickback????”
In yet another damning email cited in the indictment, Morens wrote, “We all agree that we want to keep off any fingerprints including from North Carolina Scientist 1. I need to keep all this off of gov’t email and gov’t phone text.”
Can it possibly get any more ironic? Morens, a top NIH scientist, sent this incriminating reminder to his colleagues about not leaving signs of culpability on government email or government phone texts—in a government email, from his government phone.
The culture at NIH was apparently so corrupt that a senior federal official was brazen enough to write emails soliciting a kickback, reminding his colleagues to hide their actions from government eyes, and confirming the agency’s FOIA official had taught the scientists how to destroy government records.
Informed sources say the Morens emails will inevitably drag other Fauci cronies down with him; it is just a matter of time.
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Scandal’s Trail Leads Back to 2002
“Fauci’s involvement in gain-of-function goes way back to 2002 when coronaviruses were originally not transmissible to human beings,” investigative reporter Laura Logan elaborated in a Fox News appearance. “Americans need to understand Dr. Fauci was funding gain-of-function long before he farmed it out to China. It was being carried out at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill. But it was deemed too dangerous so Congress banned it and Fauci pushed it abroad to China.”
Support for Logan’s perspective comes from a Vanity Fair investigation based on “interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents,” the magazine said.
It found that “conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into Covid-19’s origin at every step.”
In one State Department meeting, the magazine editors said, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of Covid-19.”
Why not? Because, he was told, it would “open a can of worms if it continued.”
Those comments about avoiding any real investigation into China’s role—for fear of exposing U.S.-funded gain-of-function research—suggest that even now, with all the revelations that have surfaced, the public has seen only a fraction of the full story.
What has emerged so far appears to be merely the tip of a far larger and darker iceberg.
