Matthew Pottinger, who is Donald Trump’s Deputy National Security Adviser, said the most credible theory is that coronavirus leaked out of a laboratory in China. Per the Daily Mail, Pottinger said,
Mr Pottinger said that the latest intelligence points to the virus leaking from the top-secret Wuhan Institute of Virology, 11 miles from the market, saying: ‘There is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus.’
He claimed the pathogen may have escaped through a ‘leak or an accident’, adding: ‘Even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story.’
The comments, which were made during a Zoom conference with MPs on China last week, come as a team of experts from the World Health Organisation prepare to fly to Wuhan to investigate how the pandemic began.
Critics fear the probe will be a whitewash given China’s influence on the WHO.
‘MPs around the world have a moral role to play in exposing the WHO investigation as a Potemkin exercise,’ Mr Pottinger told the parliamentarians, in reference to the fake villages created in the Crimea in the 18th Century, intended to convince the visiting Russian Empress Catherine the Great that the region was in good health.
The difficultly in figuring out where the coronavirus came from is twofold. First of all, the Wuhan wet market actually is a logical place that a virus like this could develop. You have all those different animals in one place and humans eating them. There’s also a high-security biolab nearby. Would China have released a virus like that intentionally in one of their own cities? Probably not, but could someone have screwed up, gotten infected, and gone to the wet market to eat? Absolutely. That is entirely possible.
That leads us to the second problem. China’s government lies about everything and controls the flow of information in and out of the country. Even if they know exactly where the virus came from, they’ll never admit it if it came out of that lab. What that means is that unless our intelligence agencies happen to listen in on Chinese officials telling each other the truth, we may never definitively know whether the virus came from the lab or not. That being said, the fact that there was a virus lab at the location where a plague that swept the world began seems like far more than a coincidence. If you had to lay bets on where COVID-19 came from, despite all the denials, that has always seemed like the best place to put your money.
John Hawkins is the author of 101 Things All Young Adults Should Know. You can find him on Parler here, Twitter here, and his Facebook page is here.
