“Not a thing” has changed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s suspicion that the coronavirus might have originated from a lab in Wuhan, he said Tuesday, following the World Health Organization’s investigation calling the hypothesis an “extremely unlikely” possibility.
Pompeo implied that the Chinese Communist Party could seek to distort findings from the global health agency’s investigation, adding, “I hope that’s not the case here with what they’ve announced today. … I’ll look forward to seeing their reports and analysis.”
“I must say, the reason we left the World Health Organization was because we came to believe that it was corrupt. It had been politicized. It was bending a knee to General Secretary Xi Jinping in China,” Pompeo said. “I hope [WHO] got to see all the data, all the science, into the lab, talk to the doctors, interview them … in private, in places where they could actually tell the truth about what took place.”
The Trump administration withdrew from the WHO in 2020, claiming that the United Nations agency was incompetent and influenced by China. The Biden administration decided to rejoin it this year.
Following a multiweek joint investigation between the WHO and Chinese officials, Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the visiting WHO team in Wuhan, said the most likely infection vector was the virus jumping from an animal to another human, dismissing theories of lab origin as “unlikely.”
“We, in terms of arguments against, look at the fact that nowhere previously was this particular virus researched or identified or known,” Embarek said. “We were also discussing with the managers and the staff of many of the relevant labs in the region. … We also looked, for example, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology BSL-4 … and it was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a place. And we also know that when lab accidents happen, they are, of course, extremely rare.”
Pompeo and other intelligence officials have touted in the past that their investigations point to a likely accidental lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, though WHO’s investigation claims the virus was not researched or identified at that lab.
Pompeo said in January that the government has reason to believe that “several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
The evidence of researchers exhibiting symptoms of the virus as far back as fall 2019 “raises questions” about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among staff and students researching SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses, he added.
“I continue to know there is significant evidence … that the virus may have come from that laboratory,” Pompeo said.
