Enabling China’s Coverup
The US intelligence community has told President Biden it couldn’t come to a clear conclusion on COVID’s origins — because China wouldn’t provide the needed information. No kidding. China has been covering up from the start of the pandemic that’s killed 4 million worldwide, which is just one of many clues that COVID likely leaked from a Wuhan lab. But Biden’s intel agencies don’t want to go there.
Biden ordered the probe in May a day after news broke of his administration’s shutdown of a similar State Department inquiry. Tuesday, he got what he plainly wanted, a classified report that was inconclusive on whether the virus jumped from animals to humans or escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, located where the pandemic began.
“If China’s not going to give access to certain data sets, you’re never really going to know,” one unnamed official told The Wall Street Journal. But growing evidence points to a lab leak (which itself explains China’s stonewall).
If an animal passed the virus on to humans, some of the species should have COVID now, but no such critter’s been found, despite Chinese scientists’ extensive search.
But we do know that Wuhan Institute researchers years ago acquired bats filthy with coronaviruses and were doing “gain of function” research at the WIV — whose labs have a long history of safety problems. And that soon after Beijing admitted that a deadly outbreak was underway, it began deleting online WIV data.
But Chinese-born Miles Yu, a historian in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, had downloaded copies of many WIV Web pages, the Journal reports. With support from then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he started the State investigation.
State researchers soon found a buried report about several WIV researchers falling ill in fall 2019 with COVID-consistent symptoms and new evidence of the lab’s classified work for the Chinese military. But some State officials and others with Health and Human Services objected to the probe, winning out when Team Biden killed it.
Beijing is still blustering about “a counterattack” against those who “baselessly accuse China” on COVID, as a spokesman put it this week. It claims it will “continue to cooperate” with WHO — when in fact it rejected the agency’s July proposal for a second, more serious investigation in Wuhan.
Are such over-the-top threats why Team Biden won’t pressure China to come clean?