The coronavirus probably came out of a lab in Wuhan, according to Fox News
"There is growing confidence that the COVID-19 outbreak probably originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, though not as a biological weapon, but as part of China's attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States". This is the main conclusion of an article published by the U.S.-based Fox News, affiliated with the White House, on Thursday. The authors cite anonymous sources, who claim to have had access to classified and open source documents and evidence. "This may be the most costly government cover-up of all time," the sources consulted by the newspaper said in a reference to the Chinese government. They reveal that the authorities of the Asian giant have destroyed samples, washed contaminated areas, erased initial reports and removed academic articles. They also claim that the World Health Organization (WHO) cooperated with Beijing to cover up this alleged origin of the pandemic.
The US President himself, Donald Trump, revived this hypothesis at a press conference yesterday: "We are hearing more and more of the story... We are making a very thorough examination of this horrible situation," the president told the press. For his part, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, merely confirmed that the possibility that the coronavirus had come out of a laboratory in Wuhan is being studied: "It should not surprise you that we have been very interested in this and that we have had a lot of intelligence in looking at it. I would just say that, at this point, it is inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate that it is natural, but we don't know that for sure [...] Even today, I see them withholding information [from Chinese authorities] and I think we need to do more to continue to pressure them to share [more data]. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper also said: "Most people think it started naturally, organically, so to speak. I think in due course, once we get past the pandemic that we're in now, there will be time to look back and really determine what happened and make sure we have a better understanding so that we can prevent this in the future," he said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did go further: "What we do know is that this virus originated in Wuhan, China. We know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is just a few miles from the wet market. There is still much to learn. You should know that the U.S. government is working diligently to solve this," he said.
Analyst Josh Rogin wrote this Tuesday in The Washington Post: "Two years before the coronavirus pandemic swept the world, U.S. embassy officials visited a Chinese research center in Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings to Washington about inadequate security at the laboratory, which was conducting risky studies on bat coronaviruses. The expert reveals how members of the American giant's diplomatic mission in China travelled repeatedly to the Wuhan Virology Institute during January 2018. According to his sources, U.S. officials were forced to send two unclassified "cables" to the White House. While one of them warned about the weaknesses of the facility's security system, so they proposed more attention and help, the second noted that laboratory work with bat coronaviruses had the risk of human transmission, which could lead to a new pandemic similar to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which struck Asia in 2003.
"I don't think it's a conspiracy theory. I think it's a legitimate question that needs to be investigated and answered ... Understanding exactly how this originated is critical to preventing this from happening in the future," says Xiao Qiang, a research scientist in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. "We don't know if the new coronavirus originated in Wuhan's lab, but the cable pointed out the danger there and increases the impetus to discover it," Rogin concluded.
