CIA Whistleblower: Covid Origin Covered-up by Senior CIA and DNI Managers and Dr. Fauci

James Erdmann III testifies before the Senate that senior CIA and DNI managers concealed lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 under the direction of Anthony Fauci. Ralph Baric resigns.

On May 13, 2026, CIA veteran James Erdmann III testified under oath before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in a hearing titled “Whistleblower Testimony on the COVID Coverup.”

Summoned as a whistleblower, Erdmann detailed what he described as systemic suppression of evidence pointing to a laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2. He explained to the committee—chaired by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)—that CIA scientific analysts had, as early as 2020, strongly favored a lab-incident scenario in Wuhan (one account cited an internal 5-to-1 vote). And yet, senior CIA and DNI managers repeatedly softened, rewrote, or sidelined those assessments, ultimately issuing a “non-call” or inconclusive judgment.

Most notably, he claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci played an “intentional” role in influencing the intelligence community’s analysis. Erdmann asserted that Fauci supplied intelligence analysts with a cherry-picked list of subject-matter experts—many of whom had long-standing professional and funding ties to Fauci’s NIAID, had co-authored papers commissioned to rebut the lab-leak hypothesis, most notably that acme of academic fraud, The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Others participated in the 2019 Event 201 pandemic simulation. These individuals, some affiliated with the Biological Sciences Experts Group (BSEG), allegedly introduced conflicts of interest that steered the assessment toward a natural-zoonotic origin.

Erdmann further alleged that analysts who resisted “management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous rewrite” of the findings faced retaliation, and that the CIA illegally spied on DIG personnel and whistleblowers involved in the oversight probe.

Erdmann characterized the incident as far more than analytical error. In fact, it was a full-blown cover-up that undermined congressional oversight, wasted resources, and distorted public-health policy.

Had Americans known the virus most likely originated in a Chinese lab, he argued, the rationale for emergency-use authorization of mRNA vaccines and related mandates would have been fundamentally different.

Beyond the immediate criminal cover-up, he called for a sweeping, Church Committee–style investigation into federally funded life-sciences research, stricter definitions and oversight of “gain-of-function” experiments, and clearer separation between public-health and bio-defense programs.

The following is a C-Span recording of Erdmann’s opening statement.

Erdmann was previously known for contesting federal COVID-19 vaccine mandates and for co-founding the advocacy group Feds For Freedom to support federal employees and service members seeking religious exemptions. Until today, his position at the CIA since 2013 was not known to the public.

As it turns out, he is a decorated senior CIA operations officer with over a decade of service in the agency and decades of national-security experience. A military veteran who served as a non-commissioned officer in the U.S. Army’s 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment and later in the National Guard, he also worked in the private sector as a senior bioinformatics and biometrics consultant before joining the CIA in 2013.

His operational deployments spanned the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Europe. In early 2025 he was detailed to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Director’s Initiatives Group (DIG), where he led or played a central role in the group’s investigation into the origins of COVID-19, as well as related inquiries into anomalous health incidents and unidentified anomalous phenomena.

Given the reality of his position and distinguished career, his testimony—which he delivered at personal and professional risk—is is perceived as carrying substantial weight.

To be sure, Mr. Erdmann didn’t tell us anything we haven’t already know for years. The paper trail revealing the lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 is so big that it would take a New York Times journalist or typical Congressman not to see it.

I presented much of the documentary evidence in my three-part series The Great SARS-CoV-2 Charade, which I posted in this newsletter three years ago.

Mr. Erdmann’s testimony comes two days after the resignation of University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Professor Ralph Baric—a key player in manipulating bat SARS coronaviruses to make them pathogenic and transmissible to and among humans. Professor Baric resigned a few days after he received an HHS notice of formal debarment proceedings.

According to a report published on May 12 in Science:

Alleging a “pattern of deception” in virus studies done more than a decade ago, the U.S. government has proposed a ban on federal funding to a prominent coronavirus researcher whose more recent work has incited unproven accusations that he helped start the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already suspended Ralph Baric, a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), from receiving further money for his virology studies. Now, it has begun formal debarment proceedings, which could cut off his funding for 3 years or more. As Science finalized this story, UNC announced that Baric, 72, was retiring, but he told Science he plans to appeal the recommended debarment, likely with legal help from the school.

Baric received details of the allegations in a 7 May email from HHS, one of several documents he shared with Science. HHS accuses him of deception in communications with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has provided his lab and collaborators with awards that total more than $200 million over the past 40 years.

For well over five years, I have proposed that the COVID-19 pandemic—starting with the lab origin of the causative agent, funded by US taxpayer money and developed with US bio-technology—is by far the greatest organized crime in history.

The mind reels at trying to comprehend the sheer scope of the fraud, mass negligent homicide, trillions of federal funds created out of thin air and diverted to the bio-pharmaceutical and medical-industrial complex.

Worldwide, hundreds of millions of lives and businesses were ruined by the pandemic and abominable pandemic response.

The criminal liabilities borne by those responsible for the pandemic are astronomical.