by WorldTribune Staff, May 27, 2021
Soon after taking power on Jan. 20, the Biden White House secretly ended a Trump administration investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the potential origin of Covid-19.
The investigation was launched by Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and was run from the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance.
The effort was shut down by the Biden administration because of “concerns about the quality of its work,” according to a CNN report, which failed to establish the date of the action and cited three unnamed sources. CNN quoted one former State Department official as calling the work “suspicious as hell.”
A State Department spokesperson confirmed the termination of the investigation, adding a statement which failed to mention China or the Wuhan lab:
“Even though this discrete project has concluded, the State Department continues to work with the interagency to look into the COVID origins issue.”
A day after the report, “the State Department disputed that it had shut down the Trump-era inquiry and instead said that its work had been completed,” CNN reported. However, “several sources involved with the inquiry who spoke to CNN said it was their impression that there was more work to be done.”
Pompeo, now a Fox News contributor, told the network this week he believed the virus originated in a lab and that the China’s government was covering it up.
“I am confident that we will find that the evidence that we have seen to date is consistent with a lab leak and I’m convinced that’s what we’ll see,” he said. “If I am wrong, I hope the Chinese Communist Party will come forward and make a fool of me.”
Biden shut down the inquiry “out of spite,” the New York Post said in a Wednesday editorial.
“One would hope that, at a certain point, Democrats and the media would learn to think for themselves — rather than just reflectively deciding that ‘if Trump was for it, I’m against it.’ But that’s probably asking too much,” the editorial said.
The Trump administration’s investigation “never should have been shut down at all,” the editorial added. “It didn’t take much to see that the World Health Organization’s ‘investigation’ was a farce, and that China was stonewalling. The Biden administration’s lack of curiosity about the origins of a pandemic that upended the world came down to one thing: Trump.”
Writing for the Center for Security Policy on Thursday, Adam Savit noted that the investigation by the Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, “unearthed disturbing information before it was shut down. A fact sheet issued at the closing of the Trump administration in January noted that researchers at Wuhan got seriously ill with ‘symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and seasonal illness.’ ”
David Asher who led the investigation said: “There is probable cause for deep suspicion” that the virus escaped from the lab in Wuhan and that “some of our colleagues were deliberately playing down possible links to China’s biological weapons program.” He noted that countries like China “openly aim to incorporate synthetic biology into the future of warfare, apparently with our naïve material and scientific assistance.”
Savit concluded:
The lab accident theory has evolved from marginalized conspiracy theory to a serious inquiry. If it is proved true, the Chinese scientific establishment and therefore the Chinese Communist Party should be held accountable for one of the worst human and economic catastrophes in modern times.
This could be devastating to the credibility of Fauci, the NIH, the NIAID and the Biden administration’s COVID-19 policy. It raises questions about the Biden administration’s seriousness in confronting the profound military and economic challenges the U.S. is facing tied to China’s rise as a world power.
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Report: Team Biden secretly terminated Wuhan probe early in administration added by World Tribune on
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