By Zachary Stieber
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.
A previous whistleblower said that the CIA team that analyzed the COVID-19 origin consisted of seven people, six of whom favored the lab leak theory, and that the officers were paid to change their position.
In a declassified assessment based on information through August 2021, intelligence officials said that all but one agency either did not favor an origin theory or supported the theory that COVID-19 came from nature. That agency is not believed to be the CIA.
An updated assessment released in mid-2023 stated that the CIA was unable to determine the origin of COVID-19 because both the lab and natural origin theories “rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.”
Erdman said that the CIA’s work leading up to that assessment leaned toward a lab origin, but that management undertook a “middle of the night anonymous rewrite,” which altered the conclusions to a “a non-call judgment.”
The CIA, which said in 2025 that a lab origin for COVID-19 was “more likely,” criticized the hearing in Washington.
“This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing,” Liz Lyons, a CIA spokesperson, said in a May 13 post on X. “As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”
“CIA scientists concluded that COVID came from a lab leak. Then someone scribbled out their conclusion at 2 am and changed the report,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wrote on X on May 12.
Paul is the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, before which Erdman testified.
Paul also said in a separate X post that it appeared intelligence officials “buried evidence, altered conclusions, and concealed the truth from the public.”
The findings from the team led by Erdman have not been publicly released.
Erdman said on Wednesday that his team could not pin down the motivation for changing the CIA’s analytic conclusions on the origin of COVID-19, but that, based on conversations with whistleblowers who spoke to the team, leaders did not want to harm China.
“There’s certainly reluctance to provide information that would be geopolitically destabilizing or provide ammunition for actions that maybe they thought were unwise,” he said.
Erdman also said that the CIA retaliated against personnel who favored the lab-leak theory, including by terminating a contractor.
Prior to the hearing, the CIA officer spoke with senators in a classified hearing behind closed doors. The transcript has not yet been finalized or reviewed to make sure no classified information is disclosed, Paul said.
