CIA briefed on U.S. research in Wuhan long before pandemic

FPI / December 15, 2022

Geostrategy-Direct

Since 2015, U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance was briefing the CIA on ongoing dangerous gain-of-function research EcoHealth was involved in conducting at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, a former top official at EcoHealth reported.

Andrew Huff argues in his new book, “The Truth About Wuhan: How I Uncovered the Biggest Lie in History”, that the international scientific community and some in the U.S. government covered up the virus outbreak partly to protect virologists’ ability to conduct more gain-of-function research.

Scientists use gain-of-function to create more potent and infectious virus strains artificially in the lab so they can study how to defeat them.

In an interview with The Washington Times regarding his book, Huff said EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, one of the first to dismiss the lab-leak theory, worked secretly with the CIA from 2015 to provide information his organization gathered in its international activities, including at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Asked about EcoHealth Alliance’s work with the CIA, Huff said Daszak told him he was approached by the U.S. intelligence agency and asked to cooperate. Later, EcoHealth made a funding proposal with the CIA-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel.

Huff said he helped produce briefing slides for a presentation to In-Q-Tel that said EcoHealth would “hunt for viruses … and then do humanized mice gain-of-function work.”

Chinese officials have adamantly denied that the Wuhan lab was involved intentionally or accidentally in the creation of Covid-19, and officials at EcoHealth Alliance have denied their former employee’s charges.

Huff, an infectious disease epidemiologist and former vice president at the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, said in the interview that the group was engaged in “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the years before Covid-19 first emerged from Wuhan in late 2019.

Huff said he is convinced that the virus that caused the Covid pandemic was manufactured at the institute’s laboratory and leaked out.

“I suspected that this was a lab leak from Day One, and as time went on, the information gaps that I had were filled,” Huff said according to the report by security correspondent Bill Gertz.

As for the other leading theory on the origin of the virus — that it emerged naturally and was transferred to humans from an infected animal — Huff said there is no evidence.

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