A top Trump administration health official pushed back on speculation that the new coronavirus strain is the result of Chinese bioweapons research.
“We have no information whatsoever about this being a manufactured virus,” Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary for health, told reporters Tuesday during a briefing hosted by the Alliance for Health Policy. The origins of the virus weren’t yet known, he added, and there was “a lot more work that needs to be done.”
The virus, Giroir said, likely started in an animal, as many coronaviruses do. Chinese officials have said the virus originated from a fish and meat market in Wuhan, China, that was shut down, and some reports say it may be linked to the pangolin, a scaly mammal that is on the endangered species list.
President Trump has said little about the coronavirus but has praised Chinese officials for the way they are handling it. Top U.S. health officials have been holding regular, private briefings with members of Congress, who have questioned whether China has been forthcoming about the virus. The disease, a respiratory illness known as COVID-19, has spread to 71,429 people globally and has killed 1,772 people in China.
While Trump administration officials have been hesitant to accuse China of hiding information, at least one member of Congress has been outspoken about it. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas raised the possibility that the Chinese government was behind the creation of the virus.
“Because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says, and China, right now, is not giving evidence on that question at all,” he said.
He later elaborated on Twitter, saying, “China’s official origin story of the Wuhan food market is almost certainly bogus” and that “we have to consider all possibilities until the evidence is in.”
Dany Shoham, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who studied Chinese biological warfare, raised the possibility with the Washington Times that the virus may have originated in a Chinese lab called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Wuhan is the city where the virus originated and where people have been under quarantine.
Part of the reason U.S. officials can’t be confident about where the virus comes from is because American scientists haven’t been on the ground in China to study it. The Trump administration offered to send scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help more than 40 days ago, but are still waiting to get the go-ahead from Chinese leaders.
Lawmakers have been suspicious about the honesty of Chinese officials, given that several news reports from Western publications uncovered secrecy surrounding the early days of the infection and that Chinese law enforcement went after a doctor who tried to sound the alarm about the virus. During the 2003 outbreak of SARS, which is another type of coronavirus, Chinese officials were not forthcoming about the outbreak.
The World Health Organization has pushed back on accusations that China may be hiding information and has instead praised officials for reporting cases.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said last week that the WHO “must insist that China be transparent and fully cooperative, as they would insist on the United States or any other country.” He said that getting U.S. scientists into the country would help give access to data, genetic sequences, and help them “run the studies to get answers to the key questions.”
