Trump spy chief calls WHO dismissal of Wuhan lab leak hypothesis ‘disingenuous’

The spy chief for former President Donald Trump criticized the “disingenuous” World Health Organization’s findings on the origins of the coronavirus, saying U.S. intelligence did not support the WHO’s dismissal of the hypothesis that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the visiting WHO team in Wuhan, announced at a press conference on Tuesday that the WHO had considered four main hypotheses: direct transmission from an animal species to humans, transmission through an intermediate species, a “laboratory-related incident,” or transmission through frozen foods — a theory Chinese government authorities pushed for months.

He said a jump from an animal to another animal to humans was the most likely, but that frozen foods were also possible, but claimed an accidental release from a Wuhan lab was “extremely unlikely” and suggested there was no need to investigate that option any further.

The WHO is ignoring evidence about the Wuhan Institute of Virology put out in January by the Trump State Department, John Ratcliffe, the former director of National Intelligence, said Wednesday.

“I think what the WHO came out and said yesterday was disingenuous. Mike Pompeo and I worked very hard to get some of our best intelligence out before we left the office a few weeks ago so we could talk about what we knew about China and COVID,” Ratcliffe said on Fox News.

He added: “And some of that intelligence is this. The Chinese military ordered scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to experiment with coronaviruses starting as far back as 2017. Some of those viruses were 96.2% genetically similar to the current COVID-19 virus, and further, some of those scientists working on the similar coronaviruses became sick with COVID-like symptoms in the fall of 2019.”

Pompeo said in January that “this raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.” He added that “the WIV has not been transparent nor consistent about its work” with viruses highly similar to COVID-19, “including possible ‘gain of function’ experiments to enhance transmissibility or lethality.”

The Wuhan lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military,” the State Department fact sheet contended.

Ratcliffe added: “What the World Health Organization would have you believe is, after two weeks on the ground there, talking to scientists and the doctors selected by the Chinese Communist Party under the supervision of the Chinese Communist Party, … none of that, what I just related to you about our intelligence, is relevant to a potential lab accident at Wuhan. It’s really just disingenuous.”

The former Trump spy chief also asked a number of rhetorical questions, hinting at Chinese culpability, saying, “If this really was a naturally occurring virus as the WHO intimated yesterday … if no one was to blame for this, why would Chinese officials suppress and silence doctors and scientists and journalists from writing about it? If no one was to blame, why would Chinese officials prevent the world’s best scientists and the doctors from coming to Wuhan for more than a year?”

Ratcliffe argued that “what our intelligence says is … it was originated from Wuhan, and whether by accident or otherwise, Chinese officials were aware they had a controllable outbreak, but they took action that resulted in this transferring to the rest of the world — a worldwide pandemic that killed more than 400,000 Americans.”

Matthew Pottinger, a former Trump deputy national security adviser, said in December 2020 that “there is a growing body of evidence to say that a laboratory leak or accident is very much a credible possibility.” Of particular concern was the biosafety level 4 lab in Wuhan. Pottinger dismissed the WHO inquiry as a “Potemkin exercise.”

State Department spokesman Ned Price responded to the WHO press conference on Tuesday by saying that “I wouldn’t want to be conclusive yet before we’ve seen the report” and that they would be drawing “on information collected and analyzed by our own intelligence community.” He said, “The Chinese, at least heretofore, had not offered the requisite transparency that we need.” The Biden official also said, “I don’t think there is any reasonable person who would argue that the coronavirus originated elsewhere” besides China.

“I think the most troubling thing … is if we take the best intelligence on this, our very best intelligence, human intelligence, signals intelligence, and we take out the word ‘China’ and ‘President Xi’ and we insert the word ‘Russia’ and ‘Vladimir Putin’ — what would this administration be saying? What would Democrats on Capitol Hill be saying? And what would the media be writing?” Ratcliffe said.

U.S. Embassy officials in China raised concerns in 2018 about biosecurity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One State Department cable warned about a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

The cable also mentioned meeting with Zhengli, known as “batwoman” for her research related to diseases in bats.

Zhengli originally “wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she told Scientific American.

She admitted asking herself, “Could they have come from our lab?” But the magazine said she “breathed a sigh of relief when … none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.” Zhengli told Chinese state television in August 2020 that “there could not possibly have been a lab leak.” Viruses have escaped from Chinese labs in the past.

Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO’s coronavirus origins investigative team who previously worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and helped steer National Institutes of Health funding to it for bat coronavirus research, celebrated the WHO’s findings dismissing the lab leak hypothesis, criticized the Biden administration for seeming skeptical of the conclusions, and defended China to CCP-linked outlets.

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