CIA experts believed COVID-19 likely came from a laboratory in China, but leaders in the agency changed those conclusions, a senior CIA officer told the Senate on May 13.
As early as 2020, many people within the CIA assessed that the most likely origin of COVID-19 was the high-level laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first cases appeared in 2019, James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer, said in Washington in testimony to a Senate committee.
Erdman, who led an investigation into how intelligence officials handled assessments of the origin of COVID-19, said that documents obtained during the probe show that as of Aug. 12, 2021, the CIA was considering describing the origin as a lab leak. That changed five days later….