BOMBSHELL CIA Whistleblower Testimony: Fauci Led Cover-Up of COVID Lab Leak Evidence
The walls may finally be closing in.
This article originally appeared on The Defender and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D.
“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” said James E. Erdman III, a senior operations officer for the CIA. Erdman testified during a hearing organized by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul. Erdman said the cover-up continues today and that CIA whistleblowers have faced retaliation from the agency.
A CIA whistleblower today told the U.S. Senate that Dr. Anthony Fauci intentionally helped cover up evidence showing that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory that worked with U.S.-funded scientists — some of whom were involved with gain-of-function research and coronaviruses months before the pandemic.
“Dr. Fauci’s role in the cover-up was intentional,” said James E. Erdman III, a senior operations officer for the CIA. Erdman testified during a hearing organized by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
Erdman, who worked for the federal Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG) between March 2025 and April 2026, leading its investigation into COVID-19’s origins, said this position exposed him to evidence that Fauci, the CIA and other elements of the U.S. intelligence community actively covered up evidence of a COVID-19 lab leak.
He said a “small circle” of scientists was involved in the cover-up and helped promote the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus had a zoonotic — or natural — origin. Fauci then referred investigators from various U.S. intelligence agencies leading an interagency probe into the virus’s origins to the same scientists, Erdman said.
Erdman said the scientists were linked to gain-of-function research, which increases the virulence or transmissibility of viruses and is used in vaccine development.
Erdman said the cover-up continues today and that CIA whistleblowers have faced retaliation from the agency. When asked if there is still resistance within the CIA to comply with legislation to declassify all COVID-19 origins documents, Erdman responded, “Yes.”
Erdman told lawmakers that 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 product being mandated by the former administration.”
Paul called the COVID-19 pandemic “one of the most consequential events of our lifetime.” The senator said that “to this day, the American people have never received a full accounting of where it [the virus] came from, what our government knew and why they had to fight their own government to find out.”
Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, said today’s hearing “broke the COVID-19 spell that has ensnared Congress for over six years.”
“Finally, it seems that Congress might start the reckoning that is so desperately needed to account for the deaths and destruction of the COVID-19 years,” Holland said.
Erdman testified today in response to a subpoena the Senate committee issued earlier this month, as part of Paul’s ongoing investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
The CIA did not clear Erdman to testify. No Senate Democrats attended or participated in today’s hearing — an absence Holland called “inexcusable.”
Later today, Fox News reported that the CIA was “not happy” with today’s hearing.
‘From the outset of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci shaped the conclusions’
Fauci spoke with interagency investigators on several occasions in 2020 and 2021, when the CIA was already strongly considering that the virus may have leaked from a lab, Erdman said. Investigators wanted to speak with Fauci — who provided them with a “curated list of subject matter experts,” Erdman said.
However, the list of experts “coincidentally” mirrored the list of co-authors of a key 2020 Nature Medicine paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.” Fauci and other public health officials and media figures later used the paper to refute the lab-leak theory and discredit its proponents as “conspiracy theorists.”
“There is a narrative that was being generated” by Fauci, Erdman said.
Last year, the Trump administration launched an investigation to determine whether Fauci and others influenced the paper’s conclusions in exchange for funding.
Erdman testified that in August 2021, Fauci’s intervention helped lead the CIA to adopt a neutral stance on the origin of COVID-19, rather than supporting the lab-leak theory. He said:
“It was significantly influenced by Anthony Fauci injecting himself into the IC [intelligence community]. … We have documentation that shows that … the CIA was considering calling this a lab leak [as late as] Aug. 12, 2021. And then, that changed on Aug. 17, 2021. … Unfortunately, because the CIA would not provide us documentation that we asked for, we have no idea why that changed.”
Less than a week later, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fully licensed Pfizer’s mRNA Comirnaty COVID-19 vaccine. A day after the FDA issued its approval, the U.S. military mandated the vaccine for its service members.
Erdman said that while he has not found “smoking gun” documentation of Fauci or other officials openly discussing a cover-up, he said there was a “pervasive undercurrent” indicating this in much of the documentation he’s seen.
“From the outset of the pandemic, Dr. Fauci shaped the conclusions,” Paul said. “Dozens of times, he referred to the idea that the pandemic originating in the lab was a conspiracy.”
According to Erdman, Fauci’s views haven’t changed. “He believes it’s natural origin. He still does,” Erdman said.
CIA ‘illegally’ spied on COVID whistleblowers
Erdman testified that CIA officials who spoke out about the possibility of a cover-up have faced repercussions from the agency, ranging from surveillance to retaliation.
“Following the CIA’s COVID relook that culminated in 2023, the CIA retaliated against analysts supporting the lab-leak hypothesis,” Erdman said. “CIA managers retaliated against them for their refusal to agree with management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite of the analysis, which changed the assessment to a non-call judgment.”
According to Erdman, the CIA began illegally monitoring “the computer and phone usage” of DIG personnel, including “their investigations and contact with whistleblowers.”
“These were Americans being spied upon illegally while executing duties directed by the president and under the authority of the director of national intelligence,” Erdman said. At least one CIA contractor was fired as a result, “one day after meeting with the DIG.”
Erdman said the legislative and executive branches will remain misinformed if “this type of behavior is not addressed.”
Several Republican senators who participated in the hearing agreed with Erdman’s suggestions that various government and intelligence agencies are still involved in efforts to cover up evidence of a COVID-19 lab leak.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who last month led a hearing presenting evidence that the FDA knew of a better method to detect COVID-19 vaccine safety signals — including sudden deaths following vaccination — but concealed it, said he sent multiple agencies “very legitimate oversight requests,” which were mostly ignored.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said that after Congress unanimously passed a bill he sponsored in 2023 requiring the U.S. government to release documentation on COVID-19’s origins, the government “deliberately” withheld most documents.
Rather than providing thousands of pages of documents as requested, Congress received five pages, which were partially redacted. “If that isn’t a cover-up, I don’t know what is,” Hawley said.
Oversight of gain-of-function research ‘must have teeth’
Erdman also took aim at gain-of-function research. He said scientists from the federal Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG) helped overturn a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research that took effect in 2014.
“Several of the BSEG scientists helped Dr. Fauci rewrite definitions of gain-of-function in 2015 to lift a funding pause on dangerous research,” Erdman testified. He said BSEG members “often receive considerable funding from NIAID [the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] and public health agencies.”
Scientists participating in BSEG included Ralph Baric, Ph.D., who worked with Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher Shi Zhengli, Ph.D., on gain-of-function experiments, Erdman said. Daszak was later “sent to China with the WHO [World Health Organization] to investigate the origins of COVID.”
Last month, Baric reportedly lost his National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants and was placed on leave by his institution, the University of North Carolina. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suspended all funding for EcoHealth Alliance because it failed to properly monitor its coronavirus experiments.
Erdman said that some BSEG scientists also played a key role in Event 201, a simulation of a global coronavirus outbreak that took place in October 2019, shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. The Gates Foundation and World Economic Forum were also involved in the planning of Event 201.
“This was a coronavirus pandemic tabletop exercise curiously similar to the events that played out during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was attended by Dr. Fauci and individuals with IC ties like former [Director of National Intelligence] Avril Haynes,” Erdman said.
A Wall Street Journal investigation last year revealed that in 2021, Haynes opted to brief then-President Joe Biden only on evidence supporting the zoonotic theory.
Erdman said that as early as May 2020, federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Energy were circulating internal documents suggesting that “all the conditions were present for a lab leak.”
Last year, the Trump administration launched a new version of the government’s official COVID-19 website, presenting evidence supporting the lab-leak theory. The CIA, FBI, Department of Energy, Defense Intelligence Agency, Congress and some foreign intelligence agencies ultimately endorsed the lab-leak theory.
Erdman expressed support for President Donald Trump’s executive order, issued last year, which paused funding for gain-of-function research for 120 days, a period during which a new federal policy on such research was to be developed. The administration has not yet announced a new policy.
“We need a comprehensive review of government-funded life science research and a move back to pre-9/11 definitions of gain-of-function and WMD [weapons of mass destruction] research,” Erdman said. “Oversight must have teeth.”
Will we see ‘perp walks’ of Fauci, other COVID-era figures?
Today’s hearing came two days after the expiration of a deadline to indict Fauci on charges of perjury for allegedly lying to Congress in 2021. Fauci told Congress at the time that NIH and NIAID had never funded gain-of-function research.
Paul had publicly pushed for Fauci to be indicted. Last year, Biden pre-emptively pardoned Fauci for his official acts dating back to 2014. Last month, a grand jury indicted Dr. David Morens, a former top aide to Fauci, for allegedly using his personal email account to hide communications about the origins of COVID-19.
Paul didn’t address the expiration of the statute of limitations during today’s hearing, but he did suggest that the evidence Erdman presented bolsters the case for the passage of the Risky Research Review Act, legislation he proposed last year.
Hawley said many of his constituents “want to see the perp walks” of figures such as Fauci. He called on Congress “to start pulling purse strings” of federal agencies that are uncooperative with the investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
“It is well past time for us to have [another] Church Committee,” Johnson said, referring to a 1975 U.S. Senate committee that investigated CIA wrongdoing.
Watch clips from the hearing here:
Related articles in The Defender
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Biden Grants Fauci a ‘Preemptive Pardon.’ Could He Still Face Legal Challenges?
Trump Pauses Federally Funded Gain-of-Function Research in U.S., But for Only 120 Days
New White House Website Declares COVID Escaped From Wuhan Lab
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