President
Donald Trump said Friday that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating whether the novel
Coronavirus began spreading after an accident at a Chinese high-security biomedical laboratory in Wuhan.
Trump offered no evidence supporting that scenario. And aides stressed there have been no conclusions from the ongoing investigation, which ultimately may never resolve questions that have surfaced.
"We’re looking at it," Trump told reporters Friday during a COVID-19 briefing at the
White House. "A lot of people are looking at it – it seems to make sense."
Since January, theories about a possible leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have circulated largely among right-wing bloggers, some conservative media pundits and pro-Trump hawks on
China.
One scenario in circulation claims the virus was man-made and was linked to a Chinese biowarfare program, but that idea has been widely dismissed by experts and critics as a conspiracy theory. Another scenario maintains that the virus, while being kept in the lab in a natural state, accidentally escaped due to poor safety protocols.
Anthony Fauci, the U.S.'s top infectious disease expert, was dismissive of the theory of an accidental escape.
"A group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences in bats as they evolve. The mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now are totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human," he said Friday in the White House press briefing in response to a reporter's question on the theory.
But two administration officials with knowledge of the investigation, speaking to USA TODAY on condition of anonymity because it is classified and sensitive, said they have always questioned China's account of how the virus originated and have taken seriously suggestions that it may have resulted from a lab accident that the Chinese are covering up.
"There's a high level of suspicion," one official said.
But two administration officials with knowledge of the investigation, speaking to USA TODAY on condition of anonymity because it is classified and sensitive, said they have always questioned China's account of how the virus originated and have taken seriously suggestions that it may have resulted from a lab accident that the Chinese are covering up.
"There's a high level of suspicion," one official said.
eijing has clouded and revised information about its infections and deaths and detained medical workers who blew the whistle over concerns about China's handling of its response. An Associated Press investigation found China didn't inform the public about the virus for nearly a week, enabling it to spread undetected at a vital moment. China's foreign ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao has also pushed a false counter-narrative that coronavirus originated with the U.S.
MILITARY.
In late January, Dany Shalom, a former
Israeli military intelligence officer, said in a
Washington Times newspaper article that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is linked to a Chinese covert bio-weapons program. He did not provide any evidence. He noted the relative proximity – about 20 miles – of the institute to Wuhan's seafood market, which China originally pinpointed as the possible origin of the virus.
Shalom did not want to comment further on his claims when contacted by USA TODAY.
On March 25, the Washington Times appended an editor's note to its story in which Shalom appears saying scientists outside of China concluded that COVID-19 "does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab."
But the exact origins of the virus remain murky.
In a March 11 interview with Scientific
American, Shi Zhengli, one of China's leading experts on bat coronaviruses and deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said that when her team sequenced the genome of the new coronavirus in Wuhan it did not match any of the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied.
A research paper by a group of Chinese scientists published in January by The Lancet, a well-respected
British medical journal, revealed the first COVID-19 patient, identified on Dec. 1, had no apparent connection to Wuhan's wet market. Nor did about a third of the initial large cluster of confirmed cases, a revelation that's raised eyebrows.
Further muddying the picture, Nobel Prize laureate Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of HIV, released a statement Friday claiming that according to his analysis COVID-19 was the result of an attempt to manufacture an AIDS vaccine that escaped a lab. Montagnier's analysis has not been peer-reviewed. In recent years the Frenchman has been involved with controversial research that's been shunned by mainstream scientists.
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin reported this week that two years before the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. embassy officials visited a Wuhan lab and sent cables back to Washington about inadequate safety standards at the research facility, which was studying coronaviruses from bats. Rogin said that while the cables have prompted discussion within the administration, "conclusive proof has yet to emerge."
US Sen. Tom Cotton, a
Republican from Arkansas who is a staunch China hawk, has floated claims about a "cover up" by
Beijing.
"The Chinese Communist Party has continued to lie about this from the very beginning, as if they have something to cover up," Cotton said in an interview on the Fox &
Friends television program on Friday morning. "If that's the case, it really is the biggest, the costliest, the most deadly cover up in the history of mankind," he said.
Former White House advisor Steve Bannon, another strident China critic, has repeatedly validated unproven claims and theories about the covert biological weapons program origins of coronavirus in "War Room: Pandemic," his daily radio broadcast.
U.S. military planners have been non-committal about the coronavirus investigation.
"There's a lot of rumor and speculation in a wide variety of media, the blog sites, etc. It should be no surprise to you that we've taken a keen interest in that and we've had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that," Army General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a Tuesday briefing at the
Pentagon.
"And I would just say, at this point, it's inconclusive, although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural. But we don't know for certain," said.
At Friday's coronavirus briefing,Trump also appeared to take a more circumspect stance.
"A lot of strange things are happening," he said. "We’re going to find out."