CIA Whistleblower: “Dr. Fauci’s Role in the Cover Up Was Intentional”

CIA Whistleblower James E. Erdman III said “Dr. Fauci’s role in the (COVID-19) cover-up was intentional” during a Senate hearing Wednesday chaired by Senator Rand Paul. Erdman is a veteran with decades of experience in national security and intelligence, having served on the Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) under DNI Tulsi Gabbard and worked for the CIA since 2013. He alleges that Dr. Fauci deliberately and intentionally shaped the analysis of COVID-19 origins to push a prevailing zoonotic origin narrative despite internal CIA consensus that the virus originated from the Wuhan laboratory, from research that was authorized by Fauci.

“Dr. Fauci influenced the analytical process and findings by leveraging his position to ensure the IC consulted with a conflicted list of curated subject matter experts, public health officials, and scientists,” Erdman testified. “This included some of the authors of the paper, The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, and other public health experts who have been in his orbit for the last 20 plus years.”

Erdman explained how Dr. Fauci provided hand-picked experts with ties to the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG). This group is an ODNI advisory body of outside scientists that has provided biodefense expertise to the intelligence community since 2006, while also receiving funding from the NIAID led by Dr. Fauci.

“Since 2006, the BSEG consulted part-time on biodefense issues for the IC while conducting government-funded research and holding academia positions as well as maintaining roles in public health institutions and serving as members in the National Academy of Science,” Erdman said. “They received funding from NIAID and other agencies for vaccine research, USAID’s predict project, the cooperative threat reduction program, and even worked with Chinese scientists on coronavirus and other pathogen studies, pursuing vaccines. There was no oversight to monitor how this web of relationships influenced research, policy, and public health holistically for over 20 years. In fact, several of the BG scientists helped Dr. Fauci rewrite definitions of gain of function in 2015 to lift a funding pause on dangerous research.”

Earlier this week, the statute of limitations passed to bring charges against Dr. Fauci for lying under oath during a Senate hearing when he stated that the US never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Senator Paul, who questioned Dr. Fauci when the false statement was made in 2021, said that Fauci can still face charges for other illegal actions that occurred more recently. He referenced FOIA-requested emails in which Dr. Fauci told a Washington Post reporter to reach out to him on his private Gmail account to discuss the beaglegate scandal.

Erdman explained that several of the experts hand-picked by Fauci also participated in the Event 201 pandemic table-top exercise in October 2019, less than two months before the start of the pandemic in Wuhan. That event was hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“Motives are difficult to define given the scope of the DIG’s review,” Erdman said. “Intentional or not, the IC’s actions resulted in a cover-up, wasted resources, and a failure to properly inform policymakers. Public health policy would have been very different had the American public been made aware that a virus from a lab in China was going to serve as the foundation for an emergency use authorization mRNA products being mandated by the former administration.”

CIA analysts concluded as early as 2020 that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, CIA managers changed the analysts’ conclusion to a neutral position of “we may never precisely know the origin.” Analysts who supported the lab leak hypothesis faced retaliation from their superiors.

“Failure to address the United States government’s inability to differentiate between public health and biodefense and the oversight-resistant ecosystem of life science actors has been fertile ground for increasingly dangerous… gain of function research,” Erdman warned. He said the system produced a “deliberately opaque and excessively redundant biodefense research policy and financial infrastructure seemingly intended to escalate bureaucratic bloat.”

Erdman said Director Gabbard is trying to release 2,000 pages related to the origins of COVID-19, but has faced internal agency resistance from the CIA.

CIA Spokesperson Liz Lyons posted a statement to X in response to the hearing and said the committee “acted in bad faith,” because Erdman already testified in a closed-door hearing, and the committee didn’t notify the CIA before subpoenaing him for Wednesday’s open-door testimony.

“This proceeding amounts to nothing more than dishonest political theater masquerading as a congressional hearing,” Lyons wrote. “As the CIA has already assessed, COVID-19 most likely originated from a lab leak, and efforts to undermine that conclusion are disingenuous.”

Senator Paul wrote that if the CIA “is not happy,” then he must be doing something right. At the conclusion of the hearing, Paul responded directly to Lyons and the CIA. “They say that we have already obtained closed-door testimony. Well, closed-door testimony doesn’t provide oversight. Public testimony provides oversight. We have asked them for public testimony and for oversight. We would love to see their report. Why would we not be allowed to see their report? I can’t even read that in private.”