Explainers

Did the CIA bribe its officials to cover up COVID-19 lab-leak theory?

A CIA official has made claims about the origins of COVID-19 to a congressional hearing. He alleges that the US agency offered six of its own analysts ‘a significant monetary incentive’ to change their position – that the virus didn’t leak from the Wuhan lab and jumped from animals to humans

FP Explainers Last Updated:September 14, 2023 16:43:18 IST

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the visit by the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. File image/Reuters

It’s been three years since COVID-19 struck the globe; countless people have died, and the world saw unprecedented shutdowns. However, we are far from knowing how the disease originated. Was it a case of the infection jumping from an infected animal host into people or was it engineered in China’s Wuhan lab and then leaked?

Now, there are new claims that once again lend credence to the theory that coronavirus originated in a lab and was then leaked across the world, courtesy a new whistleblower’s testimony to US Congress.

A whistleblower from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has claimed that the US spy agency bribed six of its own analysts to say that COVID-19 did not originate in a Wuhan lab.

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What has the CIA officer testified? How has the US spy agency reacted? We dig deep and get you the answers.

Dropping a COVID bombshell

The whistleblower, who claims to be a veteran ‘senior-level’ serving agency officer, has claimed to a congressional investigation that the CIA had assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team, which consisted of “multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”

According to the CIA officer, 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, the most senior on the team, believed it evolved naturally. The other six were then given a “significant monetary incentive to change their position,” alleged the whistleblower.

For those who have forgotten, the lab leak theory is a suspicion that coronavirus may have escaped, accidentally or otherwise, from a laboratory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan where the virus was first recorded.

Also read: Is it time to start believing in the COVID-19 ‘lab leak’ theory?

The claims came to light on Tuesday after Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Mike Turner (R-Ohio) wrote a letter to the CIA director William Burns, requesting all documents, communications and pay information from the CIA’s COVID Discovery Team by 26 September.

“These allegations, from a seemingly credible source, requires the Committees to conduct further oversight of how the CIA handled its internal investigation into the origins of COVID-19. To assist the committees with their investigations, we request the following documents and information as soon as possible, but no later than 26 September,” read part of the letter.

Wenstrup and Turner have also asked for documents and communications between the CIA and other federal agencies, including the State Department, the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Energy Department.

The New York Post has further reported that the Republican legislators have identified former CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis as having “played a central role” in the COVID investigation and asked him to sit for a transcribed interview.

CIA speaks

Reacting to the allegations, CIA spokesperson Tammy Kupperman Thorp said in a written statement, “At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigour, 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 American agency further confirmed that they were “looking into” the accusations made by the whistleblower.

In the past, the CIA, as per a declassified report, has said that they were unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both the (natural and lab) hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.

When asked about the allegations made, the head of a biosafety lab in China said the claim was part of a much-politicised debate in the United States that resurfaced from time to time, despite the World Health Organization concluding in a report that the lab-leak theory was “extremely unlikely”.

COVID origins

Since the pandemic began, there have been questions and speculation about the origins of the virus. Despite several probes and allegations, the many investigations have failed to reach a definitive conclusion about how the pandemic began.

The US has been at the forefront of determining the cause of the virus and several of its agencies have been probing the matter. Back in 2021, President Joe Biden ordered a “90-day sprint” from the intelligence community to examine where COVID-19 came from. The resulting report, however, was inconclusive.

In the same year, in October, a declassified US Intelligence Community assessment stated that “two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.” However, the assessment was divided on which hypotheses was correct. It did, however, add that China most likely did not develop the virus as a biological weapon, and most analysts have determined with “low confidence” the virus wasn’t genetically engineered.

The very next year, Senate Republicans released a report saying the “most likely” origin of the coronavirus was a “research-related incident” at a lab in China, pointing to biosafety issues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a lack of “critical corroborating evidence of a natural zoonotic spillover,” and while “the absence of evidence is not itself evidence,” it is “highly problematic” a natural origin hasn’t been proven three years into the pandemic.

In February this year, the origin of the virus again made headlines when the Department of Energy, as per a Wall Street Journal and New York Times report, concluded with “low confidence” that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory. Interestingly, the FBI concluded the same with moderate confidence.

Unsurprisingly, China has rejected all of these claims, calling it a smear campaign by the United States. The Chinese foreign ministry has even accused US intelligence agencies of politicising the investigation into the origins of the virus.

Many seem to note that the origins of the virus will remain a mystery and will be one of those questions that will haunt scientists forever.

With inputs from agencies