State Dept: New Evidence That Researchers At Wuhan Were Sick With COVID-19 Despite Chinese Denials

NEW YORK (VINnews) — The State Department claimed Friday that it had new information suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic could have emerged from a Chinese laboratory and not through contact with infected animals.

The State Department released a fact sheet describing the activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in recent years, stating that “a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.”

The U.S. said it had obtained new evidence that researchers at the WIV became sick in the fall of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak in the surrounding city, with symptoms it said were consistent with either COVID-19 or common seasonal illnesses. The report states that “this raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”

Moreover the report says that accidental infections in labs have caused several previous virus outbreaks in China and elsewhere, and also decries the fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has “prevented independent journalists, investigators, and global health authorities from interviewing researchers at the WIV, including those who were ill in the fall of 2019.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that this information contradicted Chinese claimsreports that none of the staff at the Wuhan institute had contracted COVID-19 or related viruses and urged the World Health Organization team that landed Thursday in Wuhan to “press the government of China” on the “new information.”

“Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one,” Pompeo said.

The State Ddepartment said that China’s lack of transparency about the pandemic’s origin more than a year ago, as well as efforts to mask early shortcomings in the country’s response to the outbreak, make it difficult to draw clear conclusions regarding the origin of the pandemic. But the brief, unsigned statement issued by the U.S. — less than a week before the end of the Trump administration — provided no data to back up its claims.

The comments come as China faces criticism for initially preventing some members of a WHO mission from entering China as part of an effort to trace the origin of COVID-19, saying they hadn’t passed health screenings. While the experts were eventually granted clearance, China had already been criticized by the WHO for delaying the mission’s plans to visit the country.

China has been under scrutiny since the outbreak exploded in and around Wuhan, but the Trump administration also sought to pin more blame on authorities in Beijing after the pandemic took off in the U.S. and deaths soared. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo frequently refer to the illness as the “China virus,” “China plague” and “Wuhan virus.”