by Colin Aamot
Newly released documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal early evidence and analysis from four years ago in which U.S. government officials indicated that COVID-19 comes from Wuhan, China.
These findings in CDC Documents The documents obtained by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which date back approximately six months to the original outbreak, are only now coming to lightweight because of repeated delays by the government in releasing relevant documents through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Additionally, the exploit of encrypted messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp by federal employees to circumvent recordkeeping requirements under the Federal Records Act has become commonplace in the federal workplace, despite clear violations (as we will see below).
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So far, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who has served in her role since January 2021, has released minimal documentation under the COVID-19 Origins Act that the president Joe Bidenwho appointed her signed the bill into law in March 2023.
The novel law requires Haines, as director of national intelligence, to declassify information about the links between COVID-19 and China Institute of Virology in Wuhan within 90 days from the date of entry into force.
But Haines apparently did not make sure that such documents were provided. to the Congress.
Heritage Supervision Project 1066 pages of related documents obtained from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, under the Freedom of Information Act.
Official Representative of the Intelligence Community rating on the origin of COVID-19, as of June 2023, states that it cannot be determined: “IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that this information does not confirm or refute any of the hypotheses regarding the origin of the pandemic, because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases, some of which were not consistent with COVID-19.”
However, documents made available to the Heritage Oversight Project include a presentation titled “Overview of COVID-19” by Dr. John T. Brookswho was the CDC’s chief medical officer for the COVID-19 crisis response, according to his LinkedIn profile.
In his speech, Brooks repeatedly emphasized that early analyses showed the disease originated in Wuhan.
According to the documents (page 386), since May 8, 2020, Brooks has served as the Chief Science Officer under the supervision of the Principal Deputy Incident Manager in the organization responsible for the government’s COVID-19 response.
One document released under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, includes the slide deck above. It shows that in data files for analyzing COVID-19 samples, staff used the word “Wuhan” in red letters (in so-called phylogenetic analysis file tracks showing DNA sequence patterns and similarities).
One source, who had access to the information and asked to remain anonymous, told Heritage: Supervision project that in slow summer 2020, an intelligence report emerged in the intelligence community that was based on a single source and was unassessed (i.e., one that did not take into account other sources or intelligence cooperation).
The report indicated that the novel coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, where a Chinese research laboratory called the Wuhan Institute of Virology is located.
There is no evidence that the US government’s primary intelligence on the origins of the coronavirus was made available to congressional committees or declassified under the Act on the Origin of COVID-19.
Latest releases documents provided to Heritage’s Oversight Project — through the State Department and under the Freedom of Information Act — highlight the brittle timeline of what the 2020 emails described as “Updated Timeline of PRC Cover-Up (April 28)” (The acronym PRC refers to the People’s Republic of China, the full name of the communist state.)
The email traffic, sent primarily to State Department executives as well as several inspector generals and White House officials, detailed what was termed
suppression and destruction of evidence: e.g. destruction of virus samples in genomics labs, whitewashing of wildlife stalls, failure to release genome sequences publicly, closure of Shanghai lab to “correct” after releasing its own genome, subjecting scientific articles to prior scrutiny by [Chinese] Ministry of Science and Technology, data on asymptomatic “silent carriers” kept secret …
This situation where Congress fails to provide timely access to information from Biden Administrationunderscores the inherent imbalance between the two branches of government. Considerable delay years took place before the executive branch transmitted the relevant information to the legislative branch.
Jamie Metzl, Senior Research Fellow at the Atlantic Council, he testified March 8, 2023, on China’s achievements in the fight against COVID-19 before the House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“Since the early days of the pandemic,” Metzl told lawmakers, “the Chinese government has destroyed samples, suppressed records, imprisoned courageous Chinese journalists, prevented Chinese scientists from speaking or writing anything about the causes of the pandemic without prior government approval, actively spread disinformation, and done virtually everything possible to prevent the unfettered, evidence-based investigation that is so urgently needed.”
Slides made available under an Oversight Project Freedom of Information Act request contain detailed links to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan in early January 2020, and the concentration of COVID-19 cases in early January 2020.
Four months into his presidency, on May 26, 2021, Biden announced further investigation into the origins of COVID-19, ordering Haines and the rest of the intelligence community to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion.”
The Biden administration has previously tried to avoid directly linking COVID-19 to China or other geographic locations. The administration has called terms like “Wuhan flu” “inflammatory and xenophobic rhetoric” in presidential actions during the ongoing government response to the disease.
The COVID-19 Origins Act, a bipartisan bill signed by Biden in March 2023, required Haines’ Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information about the origins of the deadly disease.
But with Democrats in power, it took Congress more than three years to conduct oversight investigations into the origins of COVID-19 by establishing the House Elections Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The panel was created in early 2023, after a novel Republican majority in the House took power from Democrats.
It took Congress more than three years to resume oversight of gain-of-function research on coronaviruses being conducted in China through grants from the National Institutes of Health, a U.S. government agency, to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit. Such research leads to a more potent version of the virus.
The revelation that COVID-19 documents were not provided to Congress comes on the heels of revelations that David Morens, a senior adviser to Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, deliberately tried to avoid disclosure of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act. (Morens also served as a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the public face of the government’s COVID-19 response.)
In letters to National Archives AND National Institute of Health regarding recordkeeping guidelines and compliance with the Federal Records Act, a House subcommittee on pandemics found that Morens deleted emails and used special characters and spelling errors to avoid text matches in records requests. The Fauci aide also used private emails to facilitate the destruction and withholding of federal records from oversight through records retention or FOIA requests.
To date, Congress has taken little to no action to stop Morens and other federal employees from programmatically circumventing federal record-keeping guidelines.
In an information age in which the volume of records created by the U.S. Executive Branch of the Government has exploded each year, as well as the intentional destruction of records, Congressional oversight has consistently failed to provide timely and meaningful access to Executive Branch documents.
Blatant violations of the Federal Records Act have become so stern that some federal employees have openly included the name of Signal and other encrypted messaging apps alongside their cellphone numbers in their email signature pads without fear of punishment or congressional oversight.
Congress should reassert its right to promptly access data and information, including classified information, from the executive branch through investigations and subpoenas.
Without this capability, we risk that congressional oversight will be delayed for years, undermining the purpose of oversight and potentially rendering it ineffective.
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Colin Aamot is an investigative columnist for The Daily Signal and an investigator for The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. He previously served as a psychological operations planner for the Army Special Operations Command.
Photo “CDC” by Raed Mansour.CC BY 2.0.
