President Joe Biden’s State Department ended an inquiry into whether the COVID-19 virus could have been leaked from a Wuhan lab.
From Fox News:
The Biden administration terminated the inquiry â which was being led out of the State Departmentâs arms control and verification bureau and initially launched at the request of former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo â after being briefed on the team’s initial findings in February and March.
A State Department official told Fox News that the contractor working on the investigation was doing research on several topics in addition to the virus origin probe, with the department only choosing to shut down the virus probe because of concerns over its methodology.
But the contractor working on the inquiry, David Asher, defended his investigation and accused some in the State Department of “deliberately playing down possible links to Chinaâs biological weapons program.”:
“It is U.S. law to engage in effective arms control and nonproliferation, not facilitate it via âscientific cooperationâ in the name of threat reduction or refusal to engage in effective compliance with Communist countries that openly aim to incorporate synthetic biology into the future of warfare (apparently with our naive material and scientific assistance),” Asher said.
“We donât know for certain what happened in Wuhan but we had every reason to investigate and ask questions,” Asher continued. “As the State Department’s Jan. 15 statement said â and as additional disclosures and expert analyses of the last few months have underscored â there is probable cause for deep suspicion.”
Asher was one of the officials behind a Jan 15. memo released by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that accused the Wuhan Institute of Virology of collaborating on “secret projects” with the Chinese military, doing so “despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects within Chinaâs military” since “at least 2017.”
Asher told Fox News in a statement that “certainly the Chinese Communist Party engaged in a huge coverup over the stealth ability of COVID to transmit human-to-human.”:
“The coverup continues via refusal to allow WHO access, accept CDC offers to assist, and simply tell the truth of this pandemicâs endemic dangerous, incessant and pernicious injurious traits, which has caused huge injury to the American people and citizens of the world, Chinese citizens included,” he said. “Does anyone sane doubt that?”
Asher added that he doesnât “know why the Biden team would doubt an effort to carry out a fair and accurate investigation into a subject that increasing numbers of leading scientists are now also calling to study.”
“At the State Department in the last months of the last administration we didnât draw or assert any conclusions, but we worked successfully to reveal certain facts and raise significant questions about the clear plausibility of a lab leak origin,” Asher said. “This was a global public service, and it is good that experts and journalists are increasingly turning their own attention to the issue, albeit belatedly.”
The story comes after Dr. Anthony Fauci revealed that the National Institute of Health had indeed earmarked $600,000 in funding to go to the Wuhan lab in an effort to study the transmissibility of coronaviruses from bats to humans. But Fauci also denied the funding in any way went to controversial gain-of-function research.
âThat categorically was not done,â Fauci said of gain-of-function research.
âWe had a big scare with SARS-CoV-1 back in 2002, 2003, where that particular virus unquestionably went from a bat to an intermediate host to start an epidemic and a pandemic that resulted in 8,000 cases and close to 800 deaths,â Fauci said. âIt would have been almost a dereliction of our duty if we didnât study this, and the only way you can study these things is youâve got to go where the action is.â
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