Senator Marshall Calls for Federal Watchdog to Investigate Intelligence Community’s Covid-19 Origins Assessment

Washington, D.C. – Today U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. is releasing the latest developments in his ongoing investigation into Covid-19 origins which includes new information from a Department of Defense (DoD) whistleblower. New records from the whistleblower confirm that the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) had access to evidence during its assessment of the COVID-19 origin that points to the virus’ laboratory origins at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).  Senator Marshall sent the records and other new information in a letter to Thomas Monheim, Inspector General of the IC, requesting an investigation into the integrity of the Intelligence Community’s COVID-19 origins assessment process and its unchanged conclusion after four years that despite significant evidence in support of a lab leak, the IC continues to assess that a natural outbreak or a lab leak are equally likely.

The letter outlines concerns about ODNI staff and private scientific advisors to the IC who may have been involved in the assessment without disclosing significant conflicts of interest.    

“Witnesses claim that during the ODNI-led investigation, conflicted individuals may have censored the laboratory-origin related intelligence and, if true, this signals an alarming breach of integrity in the investigative process. New evidence from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) proves that the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) had classified access in July 2021, to a proposed research plan that, if completed, could have produced a synthetic coronavirus in 

2019 with the same unique construction as SARS-CoV-2 (SARS2),” Senator Marshall wrote.

The research plan, Project DEFUSE, was submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in March 2018 by the New York-based non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance in partnership with the WIV. 

“The new records from DoD validate that ODNI and the IC experts had access to the DEFUSE proposal and budget records, therefore investigation is warranted to determine if the DEFUSE to determine if the ODNI or IC evaluations of the DEFUSE records were impeded, misdirected or if the significance of the proposal was downplayed by advisors or staff,” Senator Marshall continued.

The senator also describes two key research studies conducted in China before the pandemic that both show how top China scientists and infectious disease experts did not believe that a threat of outbreak from bat coronavirus infection was likely to occur in the city of Wuhan, China.  

In a 2019 study facilitated by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, China’s experts ranked coronavirus as number 21 in the list of zoonotic threats most likely to cause disease outbreaks in China. A second study referenced in the letter was conducted by the WIV and EcoHealth Alliance, in which researchers used blood samples from Wuhan city inhabitants to establish the control group because of the low risk that the Wuhan population would be exposed to bat coronaviruses. 

You can read Senator Marshall’s letter to Inspector General Monheim HERE.

Records the DoD whistleblower shared with Senator Marshall’s office related to the presence of DEFUSE files on DARPA’s servers are available HERE.