President Joe Biden walks from the State Dining Room of the White House to a podium in the Cross Hall of the White House Thursday, March 11, 2021, to deliver remarks on the one year anniversary of the COVID-19 shutdown. (Official White House photo by Adam Schultz)
After months of lashing out at anyone who suggested the COVID-19 virus emanated from a Chinese lab in Wuhan doing work on those very viruses as promoting "conspiracy" theories, the American media have begun to acknowledge that very link.
Now it's also been revealed that an investigation was begun by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo into that topic – but the work was shut down by the Biden administration.
It is CNN that revealed the Biden administration terminated the State Department effort to research the origins of coronavirus, which came out of China and ultimately swept around the globe, killing millions.
CNN cited "sources" that said they were familiar with the decision to shut down the review.
The report said the existence of the investigation and its abrupt end "comes to light amid renewed interest in whether the virus could have leaked out of a Wuhan lab with links to the Chinese military."
CNN's sources reported the investigation was begun by Pompeo and was an "honest effort to probe what many initially dismissed: that China's biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemic's origin in Wuhan."
It was being run mostly out of the State Department's arms control and verification bureau, the report said, but was shut down when "Biden officials" raised questions about the findings.
"Sources involved in the Trump-era inquiry rejected criticisms over the quality of their work and told CNN their objective had been to examine scientific research and information from the U.S. intelligence community which backed the lab leak theory and shone more light on how it could have emerged in the lab," the report said.
Recently, it was confirmed that multiple researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got sick, possibly with COVID, in November 2019 and sought hospital care long before the virus problem was revealed to the public.
Both Pompeo and President Trump had discussed there was "evidence" that supported the idea the virus came out of the Wuhan facility, which had been funded at least in part by a subgrant from the U.S., overseen by Biden medical adviser Anthony Fauci, of some $600,000.
CNN sources reported one focus of the short-lived investigation was whether the "lab leak" was in any way connected to China's biological weapons program, and the subject was being reviewed under the State Department's ordinary review of countries' compliance with arms control treaties.
CNN cited critics of the investigation who said they didn't like the work because it was being done in relative secrecy.
One "former State Department official" claimed, to CNN, "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."
CNN presented an anonymous claim that the investigation was "just fishing" to justify pre-determined conclusions, and said then-Assistant Secretary Chris Ford recommend caution on using the investigation results.
"Pompeo put out a statement as the Trump administration was leaving office that said the U.S. had determined collaboration between the Wuhan lab where Covid-19 research has been conducted on bats, and secret Chinese military projects. The process behind declassifying the intelligence in that statement took weeks, and certain details were scrubbed from the final version which was put out, sources familiar with the process told CNN. The State Department's small group looking into the lab leak theory contributed to that fact sheet, but most of its information came from the U.S. intelligence community, sources told CNN," the report said.
The Biden administration repeatedly has said the World Health Organization, which was found to be working hand-in-glove with China, is the organization that should investigate COVID-19's origins.
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