{"id":15228,"date":"2026-07-16T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=15228"},"modified":"2026-07-15T07:12:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:12:09","slug":"cia-official-confirms-agency-flip-flopped-over-covid-19-origins-over-five-day-period","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/?p=15228","title":{"rendered":"CIA Official Confirms Agency Flip-Flopped Over COVID-19 Origins Over Five-Day Period"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Over the span of five days in 2021, the CIA abruptly changed its opinion on the origins of COVID-19 from a laboratory to neutral, a newly released document confirms. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally, CIA analysts concluded that COVID-19 likely came from a high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China located near where the first cases were detected in late 2019, senior CIA officer James Erdman III told<\/a> lawmakers in May. Over the span of five days in 2021, however, Edman says the agency changed its stance to ‘neutral.’ <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then in September of 2024 during a private briefing between intelligence officials and members of Congress, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) inquired as to how the agency came to the conclusion that lab-origin vs. natural origin were about equal, according to yesterday’s document release by outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In response, an unnamed CIA employee told Wenstrup that “he made the call to stop the shift to lab because [redacted] had come in the day before they were ready to publish which made them back off the call,” according to a summary<\/a> of the briefing compiled by an intelligence official. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the Epoch Times<\/em><\/a> notes further, officials said in a declassified assessment based on information through August 2021 that only one agency – which was not the CIA, based on details since made public – favored a lab origin for COVID-19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An updated assessment released<\/a> in mid-2023 states that the CIA was unable to determine the origin of COVID-19 because both the lab and natural origin theories \u201crely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The CIA said<\/a> in 2025 that a lab origin for COVID-19 was \u201cmore likely.\u201d The Trump administration maintains that COVID-19 came from the lab in China.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

More on Changes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A whistleblower in 2023 told<\/a> members of Congress that the CIA team tasked with analyzing the origins of COVID-19 favored a lab origin, but that after the team was paid, it changed its position.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The CIA at the time denied paying analysts to reach specific conclusions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erdman, the senior CIA official, told<\/a> a Senate panel in May that he was on a team investigating how intelligence agencies handled the COVID-19 pandemic and that the CIA declined to provide documents the team had requested that may have shed light on the change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Erdman said that the team found the shift happened after Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the time the head of the National Institutes of Health\u2019s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – which provided funding for the lab in Wuhan – briefed intelligence officials and suggested to officials that they talk to specific scientists, including researchers who wrote a paper with which Fauci and the institute\u2019s head secretly assisted<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The paper, called \u201cProximal Origin,\u201d purported to rule out a laboratory origin.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wenstrup also asked intelligence officials in the 2024 briefing about a white paper that National Center for Medical Intelligence analysts compiled as a rebuttal to the \u201cProximal Origin.\u201d The authors of the white paper felt their conclusions were ignored by intelligence officials, they informed Wenstrup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A representative for the center was not prepared for the questioning, \u201cwhich annoyed Wenstrup,\u201d according to the briefing summary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fauci Briefed Intelligence Officials<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Fauci briefed intelligence officials on June 4, 2021, and promoted the idea that COVID-19 had a natural origin, according to another briefing summary released by Gabbard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fauci \u201crecommended that [intelligence officials] take a look at Tulane\u2019s paper on two lineages from two separate markets,\u201d the summary states. \u201cTo Dr. Fauci, this paper\u2019s findings were a clear indication of natural origins of COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fauci also \u201creminded the group that even for SARS, it took 12 years to make the link to a bat even though it only took 4 months to identify the natural reservoir\u201d and that \u201cwe still haven\u2019t identified source\/origin of Ebola,\u201d <\/strong>which is believed to have a natural origin, according to the summary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fauci, who has not responded to requests for comment, told lawmakers during a hearing in 2024 that he did not talk about viral research related to COVID-19 with intelligence officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAfter the investigations began about COVID, I was briefed by intelligence agencies about possibilities of there being activities going on in different laboratories<\/strong>,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another readout of the 2021 briefing, Fauci was said to have suggested intelligence officials connect with three scientists whose names were redacted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll three … have advocated for features of the virus that they judge to be consistent with a natural origin,\u201d the readout states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An email disclosed that one of the scientists was Kristian Andersen, a Scripps Research researcher who coauthored the \u201cProximal Origin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andersen said<\/a> in private messages with coauthors that COVID-19 may have been engineered before the paper was published. He has said<\/a> that further analysis of the virus altered his and others\u2019 views.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDr. Fauci was the behind-the-scenes adviser who, alongside his hand-picked so-called experts, pushed the intelligence community to endorse a natural animal origin to hide his dangerous gain-of-function research that he funded using taxpayer dollars<\/strong>,\u201d Gabbard said in a video statement posted to X on June 18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of this in a deliberate attempt to cover up the truth and shift the blame and attention away from Fauci\u2019s own actions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the span of five days in 2021, the CIA abruptly changed its opinion on the origins of COVID-19 from a laboratory to neutral, a newly released document confirms.  Originally, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15340,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1173,1227,445,446,651],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-coverup","category-fauci","category-policies-politics","category-policy","category-wuhan-labs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15228"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15229,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15228\/revisions\/15229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cov19longhaulfoundation.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}