Top WHO Consultant Working For US Intelligence Helped Downplay COVID Lab Leak Theory: Official
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times
A top U.S. intelligence official who also serves as a consultant with the World Health Organisation played a key role in downplaying the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory in China, a former official says.
Adrienne Keen was “very involved in discrediting the information that we were trying to present to the secretary of state,” Thomas DiNanno, a former U.S. acting secretary of state, told Sky News.
He said that Ms. Keen was an advocate for zoonosis, or the idea that COVID-19 comes from animals, even though no animal has been identified as the origin since the disease first appeared.
Mr. DiNanno, who helped efforts to probe the COVID-19 origins, said he learned later that Ms. Keen held a job with the World Health Organisation (WHO), which is part of the United Nations (UN).
“They are a political agency. They’re a UN agency. So it’s just not appropriate to do work for a foreign power. And that would include the United Nations,” he said.
Ms. Keen is listed on LinkedIn as holding multiple positions, including being a consultant for WHO, director for global health security for the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and an adviser for the U.S. State Department.
In audio from a Jan. 6, 2021, meeting involving Ms. Keen, she promoted the viewpoint of Ralph Baric, a U.S. scientist who has worked closely with scientists at the lab, according to Sky News. Ms. Keen was responding to an analysis from Dr. Steven Quay, who has said evidence points to COVID-19 coming from the lab.
“I think Ralph pointed out some of the issues with the probabilities you’ve come up with, Dr. Quay. I share a lot of those concerns,” Ms. Keen was quoted as saying during the meeting.
“It would be in the best interest of the public to know what were ‘the comments of a natural origin advocate, Ralph Baric’ during the January 6, 2021 meeting mentioned,” Bryce Nickels, a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and co-founder of the group Biosafety Now, told The Epoch Times via email.
Ms. Keen and Dr. Quay did not respond to requests for comment.
The Epoch Times has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the audio and related materials.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to dispute the quote.
A spokesperson for the office told The Epoch Times in an email that the office’s work on the COVID-19 origins “complied with all of the intelligence community’s analytic standards, including objectivity.”
Those standards include assigning an individual or entity to make sure intelligence products “are timely, objective, independent of political considerations, based on all sources of available intelligence, and employ the standards of proper analytic tradecraft.”
The State Department said in an assessment made public in 2022 through a Freedom of Information Act request that circumstantial evidence pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic being caused by a leak from the Wuhan lab complex.
“All other possible places of [the] virus’s origin have been proven false,” the unsigned assessment stated.
In April 2020, the U.S. intelligence community said in a brief statement that it “concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified” and that it was working “to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Despite the consensus claim, some scientists believed, and still do to this day, that the virus may have been manmade or modified.
In May 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that the intelligence community was divided between an animal origin and a lab origin, with two elements leaning towards the former and one leaning towards the latter. The majority of elements said there was insufficient information to lean one way or another.
Most of the community said in August 2021 that there was still not enough information to assess.
In June 2023, the community was still divided on the matter.
