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, said James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer.
(The Epoch Times) — CIA experts believed that 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’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which provided funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology—met with intelligence community officials and provided a list of experts with whom he had a long history.
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