CIA experts believed COVID-19 likely came from a laboratory in China, but leaders in the agency changed those conclusions, a senior CIA officer told the Senate on May 13.
As early as 2020, many people within the CIA assessed that the most likely origin of COVID-19 was the high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first cases appeared in 2019, James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer, said in Washington in testimony to a Senate committee.
Erdman, who led an investigation into how intelligence officials handled assessments of the origin of COVID-19, said that documents obtained during the probe show that as of Aug. 12, 2021, the CIA was considering describing the origin as a lab leak. That changed five days later.
Erdman said that the CIA declined to provide his team the documents they requested that may have shed light on the change, but that it happened after Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institutes of Health—which provided funding for the Wuhan lab—met with intelligence community officials and provided a list of experts with whom he had a long history.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab in Wuhan, received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to conduct experiments on coronaviruses. In at least one experiment, the institute conducted an experiment that resulted in a more potent version of a bat coronavirus.
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