Trump
deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger called it “inexcusable” that there still hasn’t been a full investigation into
COVID-19’s origins,
primarily blaming
Beijing’s continued obstruction
but also pointing to failings by
the U.S. government.
Pottinger has said publicly since early 2021 that the circumstantial evidence of
SARS-CoV-2 leaking from a Wuhan lab “far outweighs” that of a natural origin.
He has continued banging the drum to get to the bottom of
the pandemic’s start in China.
FAUCI SUGGESTED FBI BE WARNED ABOUT POSSIBLE LAB LEAK BEFORE HE DISMISSED HYPOTHESIS
“More than three years after the start of the global pandemic, there has yet to be a comprehensive forensic investigation into its origins. With more than a million Americans dead from Covid-19, and an estimated 15 million dead worldwide, that’s inexcusable,” Pottinger and OneSharedWorld founder Jamie Metzl
wrote
in the Wall Street Journal this week. “While Chinese obfuscation and misdirection is chiefly to blame for the lack of understanding of how the novel coronavirus swept the globe, the U.S. could do far more to get to the bottom of what happened. Congress should hold hearings to establish a bipartisan Covid-19 commission along the lines of the 9/11 commission.”
Pottinger wrote: “China hasn’t been the only problem. … In the early days of the pandemic, a small group of Western virologists came together to consider the pandemic’s origin. Emails that eventually came to light revealed their plan to push the public conversation away from the lab-accident hypothesis and toward the natural-origins explanation.”
Some scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic believed COVID-19 originating from a lab in Wuhan was possible or even likely, but emails show Dr.
Anthony Fauci
and then-NIH Director Francis Collins
worked to shut the hypothesis down
.
Fauci also
claimed
last year that a February 2020 letter in the Lancet did not dismiss the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis despite the letter being signed by dozens of scientists condemning the idea that it emerged from a Chinese government lab as a “
conspiracy theory
.”
EcoHealth Alliance leader Peter Daszak was a
longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab
and its “bat lady” leader Shi Zhengli. Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in NIH funding to the Chinese institute and was also an integral World Health Organization-China joint study team member in early 2021 when it visited Wuhan. The NIH grants actually went to more than just looking at viruses and also included funding for Wuhan lab experiments on the viruses — which Republicans and some virology critics of Fauci have said
were gain-of-function.
Daszak
dismissed the lab leak hypothesis
in March 2021 when he admitted he took Wuhan lab workers at their word. Meeting minutes from discussions between lab scientists in Wuhan and the WHO-China team reveal lab leak concerns were
referred to as “myths” and “conspiracy theories.
“
“Congress must carefully look at China’s transgressions as well as our own shortcomings. The National Institutes of Health, for example, funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology without sufficient knowledge about what work was being done at that facility,” Pottinger wrote this week. “Confidential access to key records held by the U.S. government, private science journals, and companies that conduct genetic sequencing also has the potential to be highly illuminating.”
NIH announced in August it was
finally cutting off a sub-award through EcoHealth to the Wuhan institute
after the lab continued to refuse to hand over lab notebooks and electronic files about the coronavirus research it conducted with U.S. funds, but NIH nevertheless gave EcoHealth
further bat coronavirus funding the next month
.
The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had rejected a $14.2 million proposal by EcoHealth in 2018 over
concerns the bat virus experiments involved “gain-of-function” research
and “could have put local communities at risk.”
“To its credit, DARPA didn’t fund that research, but it was highly significant — or spectacularly coincidental — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, containing this precise feature never-before-seen in any SARS-like virus, began infecting people in Wuhan the next year,” Pottinger wrote this week. “Scientists who had called the lab-leak hypothesis a conspiracy had failed to disclose that the lethal virus sweeping the world was eerily similar to the one they had wanted to create.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment last year
stating
that one U.S. intelligence agency assessed with “moderate confidence” that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a
lab
in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with just “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Testing either hypothesis would require access to Wuhan lab records, biological samples, and personnel as well as frozen blood samples collected in 2019 by various Wuhan blood banks,” Pottinger wrote this week. “The malfeasance of China’s rulers is the primary reason the international community doesn’t have access to these resources and data. Since the early days of the pandemic, Chinese officials have systematically destroyed samples, hidden records, imprisoned citizen journalists asking questions about the pandemic’s origins, and enforced a gag order on scientists.”
Numerous former Trump officials
believe COVID-19 began at the Wuhan lab
, House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans
concluded
in 2021 that “the preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory” in 2019, and Senate Health Committee Republicans assessed last year that the coronavirus
“more likely than not” came from the Chinese lab
.
