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Why would the CIA be investigating COVID origin? Is this like the time a bunch of scientists discussing COVID origins internally said "well we don't really have

Why would the CIA be investigating COVID origin? Is this like the time a bunch of scientists discussing COVID origins internally said "well we don't really have good evidence either way but it's probably natural origin" and certain news sources screamed that they were internally suppressing the lab leak theory?

LinuxBender 3y ago
If I had to guess it could possibly be to figure out how to squelch the blow-back with plausible alternate causation as the gain of function testing may have started in a US college, then shut down by President Obama, then that block may have been possibly side stepped by a few people that may have had some financial incentives and may have had access to alternate funding and may have moved it out of country to maybe avoid scrutiny and then it all blew up. Imagine being financially culpable for the world wide fallout? So I guess it makes sense that it could in theory be treated as a national security issue. That's just a guess though.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
  That seems like an oddly specific guess. Not saying wrong, not even implausible, just...specific.
  - LinuxBender 3y ago
    So I totally see where you are coming from. To keep things somewhat scientific I ask myself a bunch of questions and roll a 2d20. For every five questions I get one saving roll. Then to filter out the results I consult 3 different magic eight-balls and note the results. I strive to get the lowest P-value otherwise I discard the data. I think all the years of watching "Look Around You" embedded a sense of scientific rigor in me.
shwaj 3y ago
I don’t know if you’re talking about this: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-redacted-emails/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda... … but if so your statement is a thorough mischaracterization. 1. These weren’t just “some scientists”, they were Fauci, Collins, and an inner circle 2. They didn’t say it’s probably natural origin. One puts the probability at 70-30 or 60-40 in favor of a lab leak, and another says “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.” 3. From the house oversight letter: “ Only three days later, on February 4, 2020, four participants of the conference call authored a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and sent a draft to Drs. Fauci and Collins.8 Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval.9 It is unclear what, if any, new evidence was presented or if the underlying science changed in that short period of time, but after speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, the authors abandoned their belief COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak. It is also unclear if Drs. Fauci or Collins edited the paper prior to publication.”. There have been repeated queries about what new evidence arose to so firmly convince all parties that the origin was natural and that anyone suggesting a lab leak was an irresponsible and dangerous conspiracy theorist. These queries were never answered. Therefore, it seems like quite a rational conclusion to draw that the lab leak hypothesis was being suppressed, contrary to your slanted language about “certain news sources screaming”.
miguelazo 3y ago
Is that a rhetorical question? Because it's a national security matter. And certain news sources were sadly correct, as evidence by the NIH emails obtained by US Right to Know via FOIA requests: https://usrtk.org/category/covid-19-origins/ https://usrtk.org/category/covid-19-origins/
- netsharc 3y ago
  I wonder what grandparent commenter thinks CIA's job would be... Why wouldn't they, they probably had/have contacts in the Chinese government they can ask "So what's going on?" and figure out if the story is true or a lie (If they don't have contacts they'd be a useless Intelligence Agency)
jeremyjh 3y ago
I love how you are questioning the one piece of factual information that is known with certainty. The CIA did investigate the origin of the virus, as did several other intelligence agencies. There was a report issued by the Director of National Intelligence regarding this and you can read much of it yourself on their website: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-... If you are actually asking why multiple agencies would investigate this, it seems pretty logical to me: the different agencies have different capabilities, sources and methods that could shed light on a question that could potentially be extremely important to National Security.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  This was a question of what the reason was this happened, not doubting that it happened. It feels to me like if the CIA would investigate a food contamination event. Unless there is suspicion of foul play, why? Or does every US agency do cursory investigations on anything just in case their expertise might be needed?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > if the CIA would investigate a food contamination event If the contamination possibly had a foreign state's fingerprints on it, sure they would.
  - shwaj 3y ago
    This is obvious. CIA is the spy agency. Given that China was stonewalling any attempts to learn about what was going on in WIH, it seems natural for the spies to see what they can learn. They likely have access to many internal Chinese communications. Also obviously, this isn’t an investigation on just “anything”. This is about the origin of a global pandemic with millions of lives lost and billions-if-not-trillions of dollars of economic impact. And BTW again your biases show through with your use of the word “cursory”. On what basis do you conclude that the CIA investigation was cursory (or the DoE investigation, etc)? We don’t have access to those reports.

LinuxBender 3y ago

If I had to guess it could possibly be to figure out how to squelch the blow-back with plausible alternate causation as the gain of function testing may have started in a US college, then shut down by President Obama, then that block may have been possibly side stepped by a few people that may have had some financial incentives and may have had access to alternate funding and may have moved it out of country to maybe avoid scrutiny and then it all blew up. Imagine being financially culpable for the world wide fallout? So I guess it makes sense that it could in theory be treated as a national security issue. That's just a guess though.

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
That seems like an oddly specific guess. Not saying wrong, not even implausible, just...specific.
- LinuxBender 3y ago
  So I totally see where you are coming from. To keep things somewhat scientific I ask myself a bunch of questions and roll a 2d20. For every five questions I get one saving roll. Then to filter out the results I consult 3 different magic eight-balls and note the results. I strive to get the lowest P-value otherwise I discard the data. I think all the years of watching "Look Around You" embedded a sense of scientific rigor in me.

shwaj 3y ago

I don’t know if you’re talking about this: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-redacted-emails/ https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda... … but if so your statement is a thorough mischaracterization. 1. These weren’t just “some scientists”, they were Fauci, Collins, and an inner circle 2. They didn’t say it’s probably natural origin. One puts the probability at 70-30 or 60-40 in favor of a lab leak, and another says “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.” 3. From the house oversight letter: “ Only three days later, on February 4, 2020, four participants of the conference call authored a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and sent a draft to Drs. Fauci and Collins.8 Prior to final publication in Nature Medicine, the paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval.9 It is unclear what, if any, new evidence was presented or if the underlying science changed in that short period of time, but after speaking with Drs. Fauci and Collins, the authors abandoned their belief COVID-19 was the result of a laboratory leak. It is also unclear if Drs. Fauci or Collins edited the paper prior to publication.”. There have been repeated queries about what new evidence arose to so firmly convince all parties that the origin was natural and that anyone suggesting a lab leak was an irresponsible and dangerous conspiracy theorist. These queries were never answered. Therefore, it seems like quite a rational conclusion to draw that the lab leak hypothesis was being suppressed, contrary to your slanted language about “certain news sources screaming”.

miguelazo 3y ago

Is that a rhetorical question? Because it's a national security matter. And certain news sources were sadly correct, as evidence by the NIH emails obtained by US Right to Know via FOIA requests: https://usrtk.org/category/covid-19-origins/ https://usrtk.org/category/covid-19-origins/

netsharc 3y ago
I wonder what grandparent commenter thinks CIA's job would be... Why wouldn't they, they probably had/have contacts in the Chinese government they can ask "So what's going on?" and figure out if the story is true or a lie (If they don't have contacts they'd be a useless Intelligence Agency)

jeremyjh 3y ago

I love how you are questioning the one piece of factual information that is known with certainty. The CIA did investigate the origin of the virus, as did several other intelligence agencies. There was a report issued by the Director of National Intelligence regarding this and you can read much of it yourself on their website: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-... If you are actually asking why multiple agencies would investigate this, it seems pretty logical to me: the different agencies have different capabilities, sources and methods that could shed light on a question that could potentially be extremely important to National Security.

mrguyorama 3y ago
This was a question of what the reason was this happened, not doubting that it happened. It feels to me like if the CIA would investigate a food contamination event. Unless there is suspicion of foul play, why? Or does every US agency do cursory investigations on anything just in case their expertise might be needed?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > if the CIA would investigate a food contamination event If the contamination possibly had a foreign state's fingerprints on it, sure they would.
- shwaj 3y ago
  This is obvious. CIA is the spy agency. Given that China was stonewalling any attempts to learn about what was going on in WIH, it seems natural for the spies to see what they can learn. They likely have access to many internal Chinese communications. Also obviously, this isn’t an investigation on just “anything”. This is about the origin of a global pandemic with millions of lives lost and billions-if-not-trillions of dollars of economic impact. And BTW again your biases show through with your use of the word “cursory”. On what basis do you conclude that the CIA investigation was cursory (or the DoE investigation, etc)? We don’t have access to those reports.