The CIA is taking the threat of COVID-19 seriously.
William Burns, the director of the CIA, said nearly all the agency’s officers are fully vaccinated roughly a year and a half into the pandemic, which is displaying signs of resurgence with the spread of the more contagious delta variant.
“Navigating through the COVID pandemic — and we’re still navigating through it, although, at CIA, we have fully vaccinated more than 95% of our officers, both at headquarters and overseas,” Burns told NPR in an interview on Thursday. He made the comment while talking about taking care of the CIA’s own and creating more diversity in the workforce.
The figure shared by Burns is far above vaccination rates seen across the country. A total of 162,725,812 people in the United States have been fully vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Saturday, which is 49% of the population. COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have risen above the 600,000 mark, and there have been more than 34 million cases, according to CDC data.
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During a CNN town hall on Tuesday, President Joe Biden urged people not to get “complacent” and get the vaccine.
“We have a pandemic for those who haven’t gotten a vaccination. It’s that basic, that simple. Ten thousand people have recently died; 9,950 of them, thereabouts, are people who hadn’t been vaccinated,” Biden said. “There’s a simple, basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.”
The CIA is heavily involved in the U.S. intelligence community’s efforts to discern the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Biden ordered intelligence agencies to “redouble” their investigative efforts in May and gave them 90 days to report back.
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More top Biden administration officials view the Wuhan lab leak theory to be as credible as the one about natural emergence, CNN reported this month. But Burns noted that the Chinese government, which denies the lab leak theory, has not been fully cooperative with the investigations.
“It is possible, like so many things that we may never be able to come to a definitive judgment [on], but it’s not going to be for lack of hard work or effort on this issue to try to uncover as much as we can about what happened,” he said.
