Pompeo ties coronavirus to China lab, despite spy agencies’ uncertainty

WASHINGTON » Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday backed President Donald Trump’s assertion that the coronavirus originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, though the nation’s intelligence agencies say they have reached no conclusion on the issue.

Speaking on the ABC program “This Week,” Pompeo, a former CIA chief and one of the senior administration officials who is most hawkish on dealing with China, said that “there’s enormous evidence” that the coronavirus came from the lab, though he agreed with the intelligence assessment that there was no indication that the virus was man-made or genetically modified.

The theories are not mutually exclusive: Some officials who have examined the intelligence reports, which remain classified, say it is possible an animal that was infected with the coronavirus in the laboratory was destroyed, and a lab worker was accidentally infected in the process. But that is just one of many theories still being examined.

Pompeo repeatedly accused China’s Communist Party, led by President Xi Jinping, of covering up evidence and denying U.S. experts access to the research lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Pompeo is among the small group of senior officials believed to be pushing U.S. spy agencies to find evidence to support the theory that the government laboratory in Wuhan was the origin of the outbreak. The Chinese government has vigorously denied that the virus leaked from the laboratory, and at one point suggested that the U.S. military created it.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement Thursday saying it was continuing to “rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence” to determine whether the outbreak began with infected animals or whether “it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

The same day, Trump said he had a high degree of confidence that the laboratory was the source of the outbreak, but when pressed for evidence said, “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

Some intelligence analysts are concerned that the pressure from administration officials could distort the final assessments about the virus’s origin, and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with China over a disease that has infected more than 3 million people across the globe.