Breaking: Biden Shuts Down Investigation Into Wuhan Lab
Biden shut down effort to prove theory COVID originated from Wuhan lab
By Harriet Alexander For Dailymail.com 03:02 26 May 2021, updated 08:16 26 May 2021
- Joe Biden's team ended a State Department investigation into Wuhan lab
- The investigation was begun by Mike Pompeo's allies in fall and ran until spring
- Senior State Department officials were unaware of the existence of the inquiry
- In January they asked an independent panel of scientists to evaluate findings
- A three-hour meeting was held with the panel concluding the probe was flawed
- Critics of the effort said it was overtly political and designed to burnish Trump
- Trump had long claimed that the Wuhan theory for COVID-19 was likely
- Many scientists initially disregarded the theory but are now accepting it
- Supporters of the investigation insisted it was genuine and well executed
- Biden's team in February or March decided to end their research
- The Wuhan theory is gaining traction: Trump Tuesday said he felt vindicated
Joe Biden's team shut down a State Department investigation into the Wuhan laboratory as a source of the COVID-19 outbreak, according to a new report on Tuesday night.
Last fall, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lead an investigation to answer whether China's biological weapons program may have played a role in the pandemic, sources toldCNN on Tuesday.
But the probe was met with internal opposition by those concerned it was part of political effort by the Trump administration to blame China for the virus.
And when Biden's team was briefed on the investigation's findings in February and March, they decided to shut it down amid concerns about the legitimacy of the evidence, sources say.
'The way they did their work was suspicious as hell,' said one former State Department official of the probe.
The revelations will lead to uncomfortable allegations for Biden that his team politicized the public health effort, and harmed the nation by shutting down a useful inquiry begun by his predecessor.
The theory of the virus coming from a Wuhan lab had been promoted heavily by Donald Trump, who blamed China for unleashing COVID-19 on the world. Critics said that Trump was blaming China to distract from his own mishandling of the pandemic.
Yet now the idea that the virus came from a Chinese lab is gaining mainstream support, with leading scientists who previously expressed skepticism - such as Anthony Fauci - now saying it is plausible.
Trump on Tuesday night told Newsmax he's always believed the virus stemmed from a Wuhan research facility - and felt vindicated that scientific opinion and the mainstream media was finally coming round to his point of view.
'I said it right at the beginning, and that's where it came from,' he said.
'I think it was obvious to smart people. That's where it came from. I have no doubt about it. I had no doubt about it. I was criticized by the press.'
Trump said that he remained confident his theory about the origins of the virus was correct.
'People didn't want to say China. Usually they blame it on Russia,' he told Newsmax.
'I said right at the beginning it came out of Wuhan. And that's where all the deaths were also, by the way, when we first heard about this, there were body bags, dead people laying all over Wuhan province, and that's where it happened to be located.
'To me it was very obvious. I said it very strongly and I was criticized and now people are agreeing with me, so that's okay.'
He said he felt the media was at long last beginning to come round to his point of view.
'Now the shameful corporate media is starting to come around to recognize that perhaps that is the origin, in fact, of the China virus,' he said.
'When it comes to China, the more we learn about their malfeasance regarding the virus and what they knew very early on - and lied to the world about it - is important for the United States.'
He said China should be punished for their lack of transparency, and for failing to cooperate with international organizations like the World Health Organizations - whose investigators were not given full access.
Trump urged Biden to take a tough line on China.
'We have to be stronger than what we are right now,' he said.
'What's going on is just very unfortunate.'
In May 2020, Pompeo, following Trump's lead, said there was 'enormous evidence' and a 'significant amount of evidence' to support the claim that the virus escaped from a lab.
His allies convened an independent panel of scientists to probe the theory and in January they held a three hour meeting to discuss the data.
They found that there were significant flaws with the research, and were concerned about methodology.
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'Our scientific consulting process involved dissenting perspectives on purpose,' said one source involved in the project.
'It was a meeting with deliberative disagreement.'
David Feith, a former senior State Department official who was briefed on the efforts, said Pompeo's was the only investigation taking the theory seriously.
'People in the US government were working on the question of where COVID-19 came from, but there was no other effort that we knew of that took the lab leak possibility seriously enough to focus on digging into certain aspects, questions and uncertainties,' he said.
Others were more critical of the efforts.
The former State Department official who was familiar with the investigation was suspicious of its secrecy.
'They basically conducted it in secret, cutting out the State Department's technical experts and the Intelligence Community, and then trying to brief certain senior officials in the interagency on their 'tentative conclusions' even before they'd let the department leaders they worked for know an investigation was underway at all.
'It smelled like they were just fishing to justify pre-determined conclusions and cut out experts who could critique their 'science'.
'The reason for all this became clear when real scientists finally got a chance to see their analysis, and [the inquiry's] 'statistical' case fell apart.'
Senior officials in the State Department did not know of the existence of the inquiry until it was well advanced.
After the January session, Chris Ford, who was at the time Assistant Secretary, sent a memo to a handful of department officials, including top leadership, urging caution about the group's findings.
Ford called aspects of the analysis 'gravely flawed' and urged officials 'against suggesting that there is anything inherently suspicious - and suggestive of biological warfare activity - about People's Liberation Army involvement at WIV on classified projects.'
Eventually, the probe was shut down after Biden officials were briefed on the findings earlier this year.
A source told CNN that the investigation was shut down because the Biden team had doubts about the 'legitimacy of the findings'.
Those involved told CNN the questioning of their evidence was unfair and unwarranted, and insisted they had been objective.
A State Department spokesperson confirmed work on the inquiry had stopped, saying: 'Even though this discrete project has concluded, the State Department continues to work with the interagency to look into the COVID origins issue.'
Did coronavirus originate in Chinese government laboratory?
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been collecting numerous coronaviruses from bats ever since the SARS outbreak in 2002. They have also published papers describing how these bat viruses have interacted with human cells.
US Embassy staff visited the lab in 2018 and 'had grave safety concerns' over the protocols which were being observed at the facility.
The lab is just a few miles from the Huanan wet market which is where the first cluster of infections erupted in Wuhan.
The market is just a few hundred yards from another lab called the Wuhan Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (WHCDC). The WHCDC kept disease-ridden animals in its labs, including some 605 bats.
Those who support the theory argue that Covid-19 could have leaked from either or both of these facilities and spread to the wet market. Most argue that this would have been a virus they were studying rather than one which was engineered.
Last year a bombshell paper from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology recounted how bats once attacked a researcher at the WHCDC and 'blood of bat was on his skin.'
The report says: 'Genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis (intermediate horseshoe bat).'
It describes how the only native bats are found around 600 miles away from the Wuhan seafood market and that the probability of bats flying from Yunnan and Zhejiang provinces was minimal.
In addition there is little to suggest the local populace eat the bats as evidenced by testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors.
Instead the authors point to research being carried out within 300 yards at the WHCDC.
One of the researchers at the WHCDC described quarantining himself for two weeks after a bat's blood got on his skin, according to the report. That same man also quarantined himself after a bat urinated on him.
And he also mentions discovering a live tick from a bat - parasites known for their ability to pass infections through a host animal's blood.
'The WHCDC was also adjacent to the Union Hospital where the first group of doctors were infected during this epidemic,' the report says.
'It is plausible that the virus leaked around and some of them contaminated the initial patients in this epidemic, though solid proofs are needed in future study.'
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