Government scientific advisors and officials ignored “gobsmacking” evidence COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology because they did not want to be seen as supporting Donald Trump’s lab leak accusations against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo briefed colleagues from Five Eyes — the intelligence-sharing alliance comprised of the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — that it was “highly likely” the virus was man-made in January 2021.
“We saw several pieces of information and thought that they were, frankly, gobsmacking,” said a former official whose research contributed to Pompeo’s report. “They obviously pointed to the high likelihood that this was indeed a lab leak.”
British officials, however, chose to ignore this evidence, suggesting accusations of Chinese responsibility for the pandemic were a “radioactive political issue.”
“Once the thing became fundamentally political, the ability to pursue it internationally really just collapsed because no one else was interested in touching it,” one source admitted.
Publicly, the notionally right-wing then-Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, claimed, “The advice that we have had is that it doesn’t look as though this particular disease of zoonotic origin came from a lab.”
Now Donald Trump is no longer in office, the narrative has shifted, with senior politicians such as Michael Gove, a contemporary and current British Cabinet member, admitting there was a “significant body of judgment that believes that the virus itself was man-made.”
Top U.S. health official Anthony Fauci also downplayed the possibility of a lab leak origin for the Wuhan virus during the pandemic and shielded China from criticism. After his retirement, he admitted the lab leak theory was not a conspiracy theory after all.
Fauci is accused of assisting the “gain of function” virus research in China referenced in Pompeo’s report.
