FIRST IN THE DAILY SIGNAL—Documents recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal evidence and initial research 4 years ago in which U. S. government officials have been working on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U. S. data said COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China.
These findings contained in CDC documents received through the Heritage Foundation’s surveillance project, dating to approximately six months after the initial onset of the disease, are now emerging due to repeated government delays in releasing applicable documents through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. .
In addition, federal employees’ use of encrypted personal messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp to evade recordkeeping needs under the Federal Records Act is common in the federal workplace, despite apparent violations (as we’ll see below). .
To date, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, in office since January 2021, has released minimal documents under the COVID-19 Origin Act, which President Joe Biden, who appointed her, signed into law in March 2023.
The new law requires Haines, as director of national intelligence, to declassify data on links between COVID-19 and the Chinese Institute of Virology in Wuhan within 90 days of its enactment.
But Haines failed to ensure that those documents were turned over to Congress.
Heritage’s surveillance task received 1,066 pages of similar documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, the Freedom of Information Act.
The intelligence community’s official assessment of the origin of COVID-19, in June 2023, states that it will be determined: “The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that these data do not support or refute any of the hypotheses about the origins of the pandemic because the investigators’ symptoms may have been caused simply by a number of illnesses and some symptoms were not compatible with COVID-19.
However, the papers released as a component of the Heritage Surveillance Project come with a presentation titled “COVID-19 Disease Overview” via Dr. John T. Brooks, who is the medical lead for the CDC’s COVID-19 emergency response, according to his LinkedIn profile. .
In his presentation, Brooks mentions early research that the disease originated in Wuhan.
According to the documents (page 386), since May 8, 2020, Brooks has been a lead scientist under the direction of the senior deputy director of incidents for the government’s COVID-19 reaction flowchart.
A slide excerpt from a June 2020 presentation by John T. Brooks from the CDC titled “COVID-19 Disease Overview. “Notice the word “Wuhan” in red to the left of the SARS-CoV-2 notation.
A document released under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, includes the presentation of the above slides. It shows that in the knowledge records of a COVID-19 pattern study, the word “Wuhan” was used in red letters (in the so-called registration routes of a phylogenetic investigation that describe patterns and similarities of DNA sequences).
A source in a position to know, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Heritage’s Oversight Project that an intelligence report from a single, unevaluated source (i. e. , with no other resources and no intelligence collaboration) went through the intelligence network last summer. of 2020.
The report says that the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 originated in Wuhan, China’s study laboratory called the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
There is no evidence that the U. S. government’s crude and lying intelligence about the origin of the coronavirus has been shared with congressional committees or declassified the COVID-19 Origin Act.
Recent releases of documents for Heritage’s surveillance task, through the State Department and the Freedom of Information Act, highlight the tenuous timeline of what email traffic in 2020 has dubbed an “updated timeline of the PRC cover-up (April 28). “The acronym PRC refers to the People’s Republic of China, the complete convocation of the communist nation. )
This email traffic, sent primarily to State Department administrators as well as several inspectors general and White House officials, detailed what he called the
suppression and destruction of tests: e. g. virus samples destroyed in genomics labs, market stalls of bleached wild animals, genome series publicly shared, Shanghai lab closed for “rectification” after sharing only the genome, educational articles subject to prior review by the [Chinese] Ministry of Science and Technology, knowledge about asymptomatic “silent carriers” kept secret. . .
An excerpt from a State Department document highlights China’s suppression of COVID-19 data.
This situation, in which Congress is losing timely access to the Biden administration’s data, highlights the inherent imbalance between the two branches of government. It took several years before the executive branch provided the applicable data to the legislature.
Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, testified on March 8, 2023, about China’s COVID-19 situation before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
“Since the early days of the pandemic,” Metzl told lawmakers, “the Chinese government has destroyed samples, hidden files, imprisoned brave Chinese journalists, saved Chinese scientists from saying or writing anything about the origins of the pandemic without prior government approval. actively spreading false information and doing just about anything imaginable to save you the kind of free, evidence-based investigation. “tests that are so urgent. “
A slide excerpt from Brooks’ June 2020 presentation to the CDC titled “COVID-19 Disease Overview. “
The slides released as part of the FOIA request for the surveillance project detail the close ties to the Huanan seafood wholesale market in Wuhan in early January 2020, as well as the concentration of COVID-19 cases in early January 2020.
Four months into his presidency, on May 26, 2021, Biden announced a more thorough investigation into the origins of COVID-19, ordering Haines and the rest of the intelligence network to “bring it to a definitive conclusion. “
In the past, Biden’s leadership had tried to avoid directly linking COVID-19 to China or other geographies. The leadership has classified terms such as “Wuhan flu” as “incendiary and xenophobic rhetoric” in the presidential moves and the government’s current reaction to the disease.
The COVID-19 Origin Act, the bipartisan bill signed by Biden in March 2023, tasked Haines’ Office of the Director of National Intelligence with declassifying the origins of the deadly disease.
This slide draws the main points of COVID-19 cases in China, as of January 20, 2020, from Brooks’ presentation to the CDC about six months later.
However, with Democrats in charge, it took Congress more than 3 years to conduct surveillance investigations into the origins of COVID-19 by creating the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. The panel was created in early 2023, after the new Republican majority in the House succeeded Democrats.
It also took more than three years for Congress to resume its oversight of gain-of-function studies conducted on coronaviruses in China thanks to grants from the National Institutes of Health, a U. S. government agency. EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based organization, has been sent to EcoHealth Alliance. non-profit. These studies produce more resistant editing of a virus.
This slide excerpt, from the CDC’s June 2020 presentation, describes COVID-19 cases in China and abroad.
The revelation that COVID-19 documents were not provided to Congress follows revelations that David Morens, senior adviser to Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, had deliberately sought the release of government documents under the freedom of Information Act (Morens also served as a senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the public face of the government’s reaction to COVID-19).
In letters to the National Archives and NIH related to record-keeping rules and compliance with the federal Records Act, the House subcommittee on the pandemic revealed that Morens deleted emails and used special characters and misspellings to match texts in record requests. Fauci’s adviser also used personal emails to facilitate the destruction and concealment of federal records under surveillance through records retention or FOIA requests.
To date, Congress has taken little or no action to prevent you, Morens, and other federal workers from programmatically circumventing federal recordkeeping rules.
In the age of data, with an exponential accumulation each year of documents created through the executive branch of the U. S. government and intentional destruction of documents, congressional oversight has never been about downloading documents from the executive branch in a timely and meaningful manner.
Egregious violations of the Federal Records Act have been so excessive that some federal workers have blatantly included Signal and other encrypted messaging apps in parentheses in their email signature blocks, along with their mobile phone numbers, without worrying about penalties or congressional scrutiny.
Congress reaffirms its right to activate access to knowledge and information, aggregating classified information, from the executive branch through congressional investigations and subpoenas.
Without this capability, we run the risk of congressional oversight being delayed for years, thereby undermining the purpose of oversight and rendering it ineffective.