State Department staffers were warned against investigating the origin of COVID-19 because it would “open a can of worms,” a former official revealed in a bombshell report Thursday.
Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, also told Vanity Fair that the warning “smelled like a cover-up.”
“I wasn’t going to be part of it,” he said.
Vanity Fair cited a five-page Jan. 9 memo in which DiNanno outlined “apprehension and contempt” from State Department technical staff and a “complete lack of responses to briefings and presentations.”
DiNanno’s memo also said that State Department staffers “warned” leaders in his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued,” according to Vanity Fair.
A total of four ex-State Department officials described being warned against probing the “lab-leak” theory of the pandemic and repeatedly advised not to open up a “Pandora’s box,” the magazine said.
In its nearly 12,000-word report, Vanity Fair said that about a dozen State Department employees from four bureaus met on Dec. 9 to discuss an upcoming trip to Wuhan, China, organized in part by the World Health Organization.
A small group of officials in the department’s Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance bureau had reportedly obtained classified intelligence suggesting that three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were sickened in fall 2019 while conducting “gain-of-function” experiments on coronavirus samples.
As the group discussed what they could publicly reveal, Christopher Park, the director of the State Department’s Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, told them not to say anything that could point to the American government’s own role in gain-of-function research, Vanity Fair said, citing documentation of the meeting.
A source familiar with what happened said some of those present were “absolutely floored” that a government official could “make an argument that is so nakedly against transparency, in light of the unfolding catastrophe,” calling Park’s remarks “shocking and disturbing.”
Park told Vanity Fair, “I am skeptical that people genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.”
Park also said he was merely suggesting that it would be “making an enormous and unjustifiable leap … to suggest that research of that kind [meant] that something untoward is going on.”
Gain-of-function research can increase the infectiousness and virulence of viruses, and the US government under President Barack Obama in October 2014 ordered a “pause” on new funding for those sorts of experiments on influenza, MERS and SARS viruses, but a footnote exempted projects that were “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security,” Vanity Fair said.
In 2017, under President Donald Trump, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with a review system called P3CO — for Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight — that left the review process shrouded in secrecy, according to the article.
A longtime official at the National Institutes of Health, which funds the research, reportedly described P3CO as little more than window dressing.
“If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology,” the official told Vanity Fair.
“Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”
Gain-of-function research is tied to the controversy over nearly $600,000 in taxpayer money that was given to the Wuhan Institute by the nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance from a five-year, $3.4 million NIH grant.
During testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee last week, NIH Director Francis Collins testified that researchers at the Wuhan lab “were not approved by NIH for doing gain-of-function research.”
But Collins added: “We are, of course, not aware of other sources of funds or other activities they might have undertaken outside of what our approved grant allowed.”
Meanwhile, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield also told Vanity Fair that he got death threats for publicly supporting the notion that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab.
Redfield said leading scientists — including some former friends — were among those who barraged him with angry emails following a March 26 appearance on CNN during which he endorsed the “lab-leak” theory.
One email reportedly said that Redfield — a 20-year veteran of the US Army Medical Corps who co-founded the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology — should “wither and die.”
“I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis,” Redfield told Vanity Fair.
“I expected it from politicians. I didn’t expect it from science.”
During the CNN appearance, Redfield — who led the CDC amid the height of the pandemic — said, “I’m of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped.”
“Other people don’t believe that. That’s fine. Science will eventually figure it out,” he added.
CNN later televised additional remarks from Redfield’s interview in which he said China was “not being transparent” about the origins of the virus.
“I could use the word ‘cover-up,’ but I don’t know that so I’m not going to speculate that,” he said.