In a letter addressed to CIA Director William Burns on Tuesday, it was revealed that a high-ranking CIA officer informed leaders of a House committee that the agency attempted to offer financial incentives to six analysts. The aim was to persuade them to alter their stance on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, suggesting that the virus emerged from an animal source rather than from a lab in Wuhan.
“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 House panel chairmen wrote.
“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.”
“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.
Wenstrup and Turner also requested the production of documents and correspondences exchanged between the CIA and various federal agencies such as the State Department, FBI, Department of Health and Human Services, and the Energy Department.
The CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp told The NY Post “We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them. We will keep our Congressional oversight committees appropriately informed.”
The allegations come at a time when several media outlets have warned that at least some COVID restrictions, like masks and vaccine mandates, may be making a comeback. According to polling, the overwhelming majority of the American public would be opposed to the return of mandates on masking.
The same week the news of the CIA whistleblower broke, a video of the current director of the CDC, Mandy Cohen, went viral. In the clip, Cohen states that she would rely on the opinions of certain friends in order to make final policy decisions on COVID restrictions.
