Seymour Hersh informed in 2020 that CIA had an asset in Wuhan laboratory

Veteran investigative reporter Sy Hersh (My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib), leveraging his long-cultivated intel sources made some explosive claims yesterday. But his more recent reports of the past decade or so have remained more controversial. So much so that I am linking cogent analysis of his substack piece (by Jamie Metzl) rather than the piece itself (which is anyway paywalled).

Metzl's bulletized summary:

  1. the CIA had placed a Chinese national asset in the Wuhan Institute of Virology because China was doing both offensive and defensive, overt and covert, work, including with SARS coronaviruses, at that facility;

  2. this CIA plant inside the WIV reported that a lab accident had occurred in 2019; 

  3. the CIA reported this to President Trump in late 2019;

  4. Trump “went ballistic” and suppressed the story to protect his trade deal with China; 

  5. the CIA worked to keep the story under wraps to protect its Chinese national at the WIV; and 

  6. that person is now out of China. 
 

To which I add these bullets:

  7. Chinese health officials were *sharing* with US intel in *late 2019* that there was a pandemic in the offing 

  8. Classification proscribed US intel from sharing advance pandemic analysis with uncleared US health agency officials 

  9. US health agency officials were therefore disempowered from initiating advance public health bulwarking facing nursing homes which the Chinese had already reported were pandemic response soft-spots.

My epistemic status: Cautious skepticism, on-lookout for independent followup reporting.