President Donald Trump’s former top diplomat at the State Department has stuck to his COVID-19 origin theory since the start of the pandemic, citing a supposed mountain of evidence despite skepticism from the media and prominent members of the scientific community.
“Every piece of evidence suggests the Wuhan virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Pompeo tweeted. “Communist China owes the world answers,” he added.
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Wednesday that the U.S. should also let the World Health Organization investigate its biosecure labs.
After President Joe Biden assumed office in January, he ordered his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, to oversee a new review of the available evidence. Last week, Biden said the U.S. Intelligence Community had “coalesced around two likely scenarios,” one of which was the likelihood that the disease, which has killed nearly 600,000 Americans, escaped during a laboratory accident in Wuhan, in central China’s Hubei province.
Intelligence agencies have been given 90 days to conduct another investigation to “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion,” he said through the White House.
However, the president’s description of the findings did not suggest the same level of conviction as expressed by the Trump administration.
Biden said two elements of the Intelligence Community favored the theory that COVID-19 had natural zoonotic origins, while one element leaned toward manmade, but each had only “low or moderate confidence,” the president added, citing insufficient information.
On Tuesday, Wang hit back at Biden’s new virus probe and criticized the U.S. for drawing on its intelligence agencies instead of relying on scientists.
A joint WHO-China mission had determined in March that the lab leak theory was “extremely unlikely.”
Speaking to Fox News on Saturday, former Secretary of State Pompeo said he was glad the new administration was coming around to the lab leak theory.
“What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,” he said.
Pompeo added: “They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refuse to allow access to the World Health Organization. That cover-up alone suggests that there’s a lot more that we need to know.
“That virology lab is still up and running. It’s still probably conducting the same kinds of research it was conducting that may have well led to this virus escaping from that laboratory. Only the Chinese Communist Party knows the answer, the world deserves the answers and they have to tell us.”
According to the Financial Times on Monday, the Biden administration is now more open to the lab leak theory because it is less likely to be seen as “wanting to vilify China to deflect blame”—as was Beijing’s accusation of the Trump White House.
Since Trump and Pompeo’s departures, prominent virologists have also spoken out about the possibility of a lab accident, the newspaper said, citing a formal official.
