On May 13, James Erdman III—an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—bravely stepped forward to testify to the Senate Homeland Security Committee about a cover-up of the origins of the COVID pandemic instituted by the CIA’s leadership. While the CIA’s official spokeswoman denounced the Committee’s hearing as “political theater” and Democratic members of the Committee refused to even show up, Erdman’s revelations are arguably the most sensational exposure of CIA misdeeds made under oath to a Senate committee since the Church Committee hearings in 1975.
When the American public first learned that a highly infectious variant of a bat coronavirus was killing people in Wuhan, China in January of 2020, it was almost immediately evident that the virus must have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The WIV’s website openly advertised for post-doctoral researchers to study SARS-related coronaviruses in bats (English translation in figure 1), and the mRNA of the virus itself showed unambiguous signs of a deliberate and selective insertion of a furin cleavage sequence and other artificial modifications that greatly increased infectivity in humans.
Figure 1: Job Posting for WIV Lab Conducting SARS-related Coronavirus Research in Bats
Source: Wuhan Institute of Virology, via Google Translate
When a January 31, 2020 Zerohedge article began to publicize concerns about the virus’s possible WIV origins, Dr. Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust took notice and brought it to the attention of Dr. Anthony Fauci—head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—in a February 2, 2020 email.
As Fauci’s emails from this period make clear, panic had already taken hold of his circle. They had realized a few days earlier that the NIAID had funded WIV virus work via subawards through University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric. Further email threads raised alarms about how Baric had transferred gain-of-function techniques to his WIV colleagues (tissue culture passaging was specifically mentioned; Baric had also previously employed furin cleavage site insertions) and had even co-authored a 2015 Nature article with the Chinese speculating about a covid-like outbreak. Fauci’s circle was already deeply worried about a possible lab origin of the virus and their own personal connections to it.
Fauci’s circle clearly had a vested interest in squashing any public speculation about SARS-CoV-2 originating in a WIV laboratory in China. Three hours before he forwarded the Zerohedge link, Farrar had warned the group that “questions will get louder and more polarized and people will start to look to who to blame”—avoiding such blame is a plain enough motive for Fauci and friends to initiate a cover-up.
In spite of the grave concerns about the virus’s origins among his own experts, the Zerohedge article seemed to confirm Farrar’s warnings and thus trigger Fauci. A mere four hours after he learned about the Zerohedge article, Fauci urged his circle to “move quickly” with the help of the WHO against “the threat of further distortions on social media” that promoted covid lab origin theories (figure 2). It was the “threat” of adverse publicity and not “the science” that made any discussion of the lab origin conclusion verboten.
Figure 2: Fauci Urges “we move quickly” Against Lab Origin Theories
Source: US Right to Know
Erdman’s testimony casts a much more sinister light on Fauci’s campaign to obscure SARS-CoV-2’s origins. Why would leaders of the CIA collaborate with Fauci by suppressing the classified internal conclusions of their own biological experts, and why would they continue to stonewall Congress and attack the credibility of a whistleblower years later? How could the interests of the US intelligence community be so strongly aligned with those of Fauci and the Chinese?
While Erdman didn’t answer these questions, there is another covid whistleblower who shed some light on them. He is Dr. Andrew Huff, former Vice President of the EcoHealth Alliance and author of The Truth About Wuhan. His claim is that EcoHealth acted as a cutout for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an office within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. EcoHealth participated in a USAID-funded collaborative research agreement known as “PREDICT” and led efforts to work with the WIV to harvest dangerous viruses in China. The discovery of the natural bat coronavirus precursor of SARS-CoV-2 arising from PREDICT’s Chinese operation was published in a 2013 Nature article, whose co-authors including three EcoHealth researchers and PREDICT’s Principal Investigator, Dr. Jonna Mazet of the University of California, Davis.
Federal agencies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) as well as the NIAID were funding a remarkable array of research projects around the world through a small cabal of civilian actors that in aggregate constituted a de facto bioweapons development program. In my former job as a data analyst for the University of California system, I had access to enough data to strongly suspect the existence of such a program prior to reading Dr. Huff’s book. In the section of my own 2023 covid whistleblower complaint to the University regarding PREDICT, I wrote the following summary, citing Huff as well as various emails, sponsorship documents, and other sources:
Through my stewardship of the SPX database, I discovered that a UC Davis researcher, Jonna Mazet of the One Health Institute, was a PI on a collaborative research agreement funded by USAID, known as PREDICT, that was engaged in the collection of dangerous viruses. Two of the PREDICT collaborators, the EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota Inc., were also involved in the broader program of creating dangerous organisms, including funding of the gain of function work in Wuhan and the refurbishment of biowarfare labs in Ukraine.
. . . .
PREDICT involved the collection of viruses from various animals in 31 countries across the world (including Pangolins and Bats, which happened to be the animal sources of the coronaviruses used for constructing the SARS-CoV-2 virus), with Mazet being the Director. PREDICT was supposed to be a proof-of-concept for an even more ambitious “Global Virome Project.” The ostensible purpose was that a comprehensive virome database could assist in early warning of pandemics, but Huff characterized this as being an unworkable sham. Huff also stated that USAID and the State Department often heavily interfered with the project.
In these emails, we get to see the details about how USAID, UC Davis, EcoHealth, and Metabiota were interacting with one another, and a few interactions with Chinese researchers. Different PREDICT partners were assigned to different countries. China was notable because the country lead for PREDICT was passed from Metabiota to EcoHealth on the initiative of USAID (though the reasons are obscure). China’s country coordinator was none other than the infamous “bat lady” Zhengli Shi, while the contacts on the EcoHealth side included its Chinese pangolin expert Hongying Li.
One of the 2017 emails has Mazet directly soliciting Shi’s opinion about spill-over risks. Other 2018 and 2019 emails list individuals who would make up the proposed Global Virome Project board; the Americans on the various lists are Mazet, EcoHealth’s Peter Daszack, and Lawrence Berkeley’s (later Metabiota’s) Edward Rubin. Dennis Carroll (of USAID, later Texas A&M) also shows up on a 2019 list.
. . . .
Another FOIA response (which can be downloaded from https://www.judicialwatch.org/documents/nih-ecohealth-grant-foia-april-2023/) indicates that the NIAID grant to EcoHealth that directly funded the gain of function work in Wuhan that led to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 (specifically, to enhance the infectivity of bat coronaviruses) had a UC Davis Doctoral candidate, Noam Ross, as one of its co-investigators. The grant application also cited UC Davis’s PREDICT team as part of the network it would leverage for conducting this research (in the biographical sketches, both American and Chinese co-investigators also cited their involvement with UC Davis’s PREDICT as country coordinators).
The EcoHealth grant application also indicates that UC Davis had already contributed to the creation of SARS-CoV-2 by having its Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, with Mazet again being involved, approving the techniques used for the capture and sampling of bats used by the Chinese researchers. Just as Baric of UNC was teaching the Chinese how to construct and passage wild coronaviruses to enhance their infectivity, it appears that researchers from UC Davis were overseeing, if not teaching their Chinese colleagues how to harvest animals from the wild that harbor dangerous viruses.
USAID’s PREDICT was the essential predecessor of the gain-of-function work in Wuhan. Subsequent NIAID and DTRA subwards (sometimes in matching amounts) began flowing to the WIV and Baric began his technical collaboration with the Chinese shortly not long after a suitably dangerous natural candidate virus for subsequent gain-of-function work had been isolated thanks to PREDICT. The most likely explanation for the cover-up described by Erdman is that there was a global-scale covert program exploiting various federal research finders, foreign actors, universities, and civilian corporate cutouts to systematically harvest and weaponize dangerous viruses—a biological equivalent of the Manhattan Project—with SARS-CoV-2 merely being one of the resulting viruses. Weaponization had to be done covertly through this network because bioweapons are illegal under international law, necessitating dual-use pretexts for funding their development and ongoing harassment and discrediting of whistleblowers to maintain plausible deniability.
Thankfully, courageous Senators on the Committee like Rand Paul and Ron Johnson have indefatigably pursued the truth about covid’s origins for many years. There is evidently a much, much larger problem within the federal government than just Fauci’s corrupt bureaucratic empire-building; the CIA’s clumsy attempt in this instance to exploit partisan tribalism will neither succeed in silencing whistleblowers nor deter Senators from pursuing the full truth about what lies behind its covid cover-up.
