Defector 'alerted' US intel to Wuhan
Tip from China insider before outbreak
China’s most famous defector to America warned US intelligence agencies a coronavirus was spreading in Wuhan in November 2019 — six weeks before China admitted there was an outbreak.
Wei Jingsheng, the father of China’s democracy movement, reveals in a new book, “What Really Happened in Wuhan,” that he first heard of a mysterious new virus at the time of the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.
Highly alarmed, the former Chinese Communist Party insider, whose defection to the United States in 1997 made global news, alerted intelligence agencies, a US politician with links to the president and Chinese human-rights activist Dimon Liu.
Asked if he had any sense the intelligence agencies were taking seriously his intelligence about a new virus in Wuhan, 70-year-old Wei said: “I felt they were not as heavily concerned as I was, so I tried my best to provide more detailed information. They may not believe there is [a] government of a country that would do something like that [cover up a virus]. So I kept repeating myself in an effort to try to persuade them.”
Wei said he was “very worried because . . . whichever way the Communist regime released this virus, I felt that the West is not prepared.”
It was not until Dec. 31 that China involuntarily alerted the World Health Organization there was an outbreak in Wuhan. Beijing denied COVID-19 was contagious until Jan. 20, 2020, when it admitted there was evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Wei, who spent 18 years in Chinese prisons for objecting to the Communist regime, is highly respected on both sides of the political aisle, and has forged relationships with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Wei said he found out about the virus from high-level contacts in Beijing.
“I talked to . . . American politicians in the House of the danger of this situation,” he said. “There were officials from the White House at that time as well. In November 2019.”
Wei would not reveal which politician he told. “I’m not sure if this politician wants me to talk about him right here,” he said. “But I want to say he is a high enough politician, high enough to be able to reach to the president of the United States.”
David Asher, the State Department official who spearheaded a task force into the origins of COVID-19, said the opportunity presented by Wei’s warning was like “stopping 9/11 before it happened.”
Asher said the US government had other crucial pieces of earlywarning evidence in late 2019 but it failed to connect the dots.
He said the US government first had intelligence about Wuhan Institute of Virology workers falling sick with COVID-like symptoms in late 2019, a year before he discovered it during his investigation into the origins of the virus for the State Department.
By then, 1.7 million people worldwide had died from COVID-19.