Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he has seen “enormous evidence” indicating the coronavirus pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Pompeo, who has been in his position since 2018 after serving as President Trump’s first CIA director, made the revelation on Sunday during a conversation with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week, confirming there is evidence that the coronavirus came from the Wuhan lab in close proximity to many of the earliest known COVID-19 virus cases. Raddatz pressed Pompeo on whether he had a “high degree of confidence” that the coronavirus outbreak originated in a Wuhan lab.
“Martha, there’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. We’ve said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outset, but I think the whole world can see now,” Pompeo said. “Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”
Pomeo added: “And so, while the intelligence community continues to do its work — they should continue to do that, and verify so that we are certain — I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.”
A senior intelligence official told the Washington Examiner on Saturday that a majority of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s 17 spy agencies believe the coronavirus likely originated with an accidental lab escape from a laboratory in Wuhan. The official said that the agencies that don’t currently believe it came from the lab remain open to the theory. The positions of specific spy agencies, such as the CIA or the National Security Agency, were not immediately clear.
For weeks, speculation has swirled around the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Biosafety Level 4 Lab in China, amid a debate over whether it originated there or in a nearby wet market, as was widely believed. The intelligence community does not believe the coronavirus was bioengineered nor that it was purposefully released from the lab.
The secretary of state said he agreed with the intelligence community assessment that the coronavirus likely was not “man-made.” Raddatz asked whether he believed the coronavirus had been released accidentally or intentionally.
“You know, I don’t have anything to say about that — I think there’s a lot to know,” Pompeo replied. “But I can say this. We’ve done our best to try and answer all of those questions. We tried to get a team in there. The World Health Organization tried to get a team in there. And they have failed. No one’s been allowed to go to this lab or any of the other laboratories — there are many labs inside of China, Martha. This risk remains.”
Pompeo added that “we still don’t have the virus samples we need,” and “the Chinese Communist Party continues to block access to the Western world — the world’s best scientists — to figure out exactly what happened” amid a pandemic.
State Department cables in 2018 warned about biosecurity and management problems at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the Education Department is currently investigating potentially undisclosed financial ties between the University of Texas and the Chinese lab.
The WHO concluded the COVID-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan, the capital of China’s Hubei province, and an investigative report in February found “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source” in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Gao Fu, the director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed that “the origin of the new coronavirus is the wildlife sold illegally in a Wuhan seafood market.”
During a Thursday press conference, Trump said, “Yes, I have,” when asked if he’d seen anything to give him a high degree of confidence that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab, when but asked what gave him that high degree of confidence, he replied, “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence weighed in with the U.S. Intelligence Community’s official position on Thursday, noting that “the entire” bloc “has been consistently providing critical support to U.S. policymakers and those responding to the COVID-19 virus, which originated in China.” The top spy office, led by Richard Grenell, the acting head of ODNI and the current ambassador to Germany, added that “the Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.”
The statement also said the spy community had not yet reached a conclusion on whether the coronavirus originated in a wet market or through an inadvertent infection or an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or another nearby lab, but they would “continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence.”
There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the spread of the coronavirus, muzzle whistleblowers, intimidate doctors, mislead the WHO, and block outside health experts. At least one study indicated that if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
Reports show Chinese doctors knew around late December and early January that human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus was almost certainly occurring, and the Chinese government silenced medical professionals who attempted to go public. The WHO tweeted on Jan. 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
The intelligence community reportedly believes the Chinese Communist Party downplayed the severity of the initial coronavirus outbreak and that China continues to mislead about the infection rate and death toll inside the country. Beijing has denied orchestrating a cover-up of its coronavirus response.
“The Chinese Communist Party had the opportunity to prevent all of the calamity that has befallen the world,” Pompeo said, adding, “This is an enormous crisis, created by the fact that the Chinese Communist Party reverted to form, reverted to the kinds of disinformation, the kinds of concealment that authoritarian regimes do.”
