CIA Official Confirms Sudden Shift in COVID-19 Origin Assessment

The change was precipitated by an encounter with a person or new information, according to a newly released document.

The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency at the entrance of the agency headquarters in McLean, Va., on Sept. 24, 2022. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

The CIA abruptly changed its assessment of the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19 from favoring a laboratory source to neutral, a newly released document confirms.

CIA analysts had come to believe that COVID-19 came from a high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China, located near where the first COVID-19 cases were detected in 2019, senior CIA officer James Erdman III told lawmakers in May. But the CIA changed its stance over the span of five days in 2021, according to Erdman.

During a private briefing in September 2024 with intelligence officials and members of Congress, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) questioned how the agency decided that the chances of a lab origin and the chances of a natural origin were about equal, according to documents released on June 18 by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

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 of the briefing compiled by an intelligence official.

The CIA did not respond to a request for comment.

Erdman told The Epoch Times that he is not permitted to comment on the newly released documents.

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.

An updated assessment released in mid-2023 states 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.”

The CIA said in 2025 that a lab origin for COVID-19 was “more likely.” The Trump administration maintains that COVID-19 came from the lab in China.

More on Changes

A whistleblower in 2023 told 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.

The CIA at the time denied paying analysts to reach specific conclusions.

Erdman told 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.

Erdman said that the team found that the shift happened after Dr. Anthony Fauci, at the time the head of the National Institutes of Health’s 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’s head secretly assisted.

The paper, called “Proximal Origin,” purported to rule out a laboratory origin.

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 “Proximal Origin.” The authors of the white paper felt that their conclusions were ignored by intelligence officials, they informed Wenstrup.

A representative for the center was not prepared for the questioning, “which annoyed Wenstrup,” according to the briefing summary.

Fauci Briefed Intelligence Officials

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.

“[Fauci] recommended that [intelligence officials] take a look at Tulane’s paper on two lineages from two separate markets,” the summary states. “To Dr. Fauci, this paper’s findings were a clear indication of natural origins of COVID-19.”

Fauci also “reminded 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,” and he said that the origin of Ebola, which is believed to have a natural origin, still hadn’t been determined, according to the summary.

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.

“After the investigations began about COVID, I was briefed by intelligence agencies about possibilities of there being activities going on in different laboratories,” he said.

In another readout of the 2021 briefing, Fauci was said to have suggested that intelligence officials connect with three scientists whose names were redacted.

“All three ... have advocated for features of the virus that they judge to be consistent with a natural origin,” the readout states.

An email disclosed that one of the scientists was Kristian Andersen, a Scripps Research researcher who coauthored “Proximal Origin.”

Andersen said in private messages with coauthors that COVID-19 may have been engineered before the paper was published. He has said that further analysis of the virus altered his and others’ views.

“Dr. 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,” Gabbard said in a video statement posted to X on June 18.

“All of this in a deliberate attempt to cover up the truth and shift the blame and attention away from Fauci’s own actions.”