A whistleblower is claiming that a CIA team which investigated the origins of COVID-19 originally suspected a lab leak but was pulled away from this conclusion after members of the team were offered money. First let’s set up the backstory.

As you probably know, US intelligence agencies have reached differing conclusions on the most likely origin of COVID-19. Back in February of 2023 the Department of Energy reached an assessment favoring the lab leak theory.

The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The shift by the Energy Department, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged, is noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’s office…

The Energy Department made its judgment with “low confidence,” according to people who have read the classified report.

Going back to 2021, we learned that there was a divide among other agencies in the intelligence community. Four agencies had low confidence in the natural spillover theory while one had moderate confidence in the lab leak. That one agency turned out to be the FBI.

Many of the intelligence community’s specific methods and findings remain classified, but the summary did reveal that overall, four agencies in the intelligence community assessed with low confidence that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans naturally in the wild, while one element assessed with moderate confidence that the pandemic was the result of a laboratory accident, “probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling” by a lab in Wuhan, where the first known outbreak was recorded…

The report reveals new details about the evidence on which analysts backing the so-called lab leak theory based their conclusions.

It does not name the individual agencies, but two sources familiar with the matter tell CNN that the “moderate” confidence assessment came from the FBI.

But as of this summer, that still left the CIA and one other unnamed agency unable to reach a conclusion either way.

While the National Intelligence Council and four unnamed agencies found that natural exposure to an infected animal was most likely, the Department of Energy and FBI’s assessment was that a laboratory-associated incident was the more likely scenario for the first human infection.

Meanwhile, the CIA and an unidentified agency “remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting,” the report states.

With all of that in mind, there’s a story out today about what the CIA team tasked with looking at this initially believed. Fox News is quoting from a letter sent by the chairmen of two House committees, Brad Wenstrup and Mike Turner, to the CIA.

“A multi-decade, senior-level, current Agency officer has come forward to provide information to the Committees regarding the Agency’s analysis into the origins of COVID-19,” they wrote.

The whistleblower told Congress that the CIA assigned seven officers to a COVID Discovery Team, which consisted of “multi-disciplinary and experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”

“According to the whistleblower, at the end of its review, six of the seven members of the Team believed that intelligence and science were sufficient to make a low confidence assessment that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” Wenstrup and Turner wrote.

The 7th member of the team was the most senior officer and the only one who supported the alternative theory, that of natural spillover. And here’s where the story gets pretty out there.

“The whistleblower further contends that to come to the eventual public determination of uncertainty, the other six members were given a significant monetary incentive to change their position,” they said, noting that the analysts were “experienced officers with significant scientific expertise.”…

In a separate letter, the House committee leaders identified former CIA chief operating officer Andrew Makridis as having “played a central role” in the COVID investigation and asked him to sit for a transcribed interview.

We’ve already seen some weird business happening around this topic, such as the group of experts convened to discuss the topic who initially seemed to think a lab leak was plausible but who seemingly changed their tune overnight and wrote a paper dismissing it. So it feels like we’ve seen this same dynamic before.

That said, I am a bit skeptical about the money part of this. How much money? How was this money offered? Where did it come from exactly? The whistleblower claims it was a “monetary incentive” which doesn’t sound like cash on the table. Was it just a promise of promotions if they reached the favored conclusion? It’s just hard to imagine how this would work. And also, what’s the motive? Why would the CIA want to prevent a low confidence conclusion?

There are a lot of holes in this story that need to be filled in before I can really believe it. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I’m looking forward to much more detail coming out about this. If it’s true, that would be a pretty dramatic turn of events. I guess we’ll see if the CIA changes its public stance on the lab leak.