Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mentioned Sunday that “monumental proof” signifies that the covid-19 virus originated at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
“Keep in mind, China has a historical past of infecting the world, and so they have a historical past of operating substandard laboratories,” Pompeo mentioned on ABC Information’s “This Week.” “These will not be the primary instances that we’ve had a world uncovered to viruses as the results of failures in a Chinese language lab.”
Pompeo’s feedback echoed these of Trump, who mentioned he has seen proof giving him a “excessive diploma of confidence” that the virus got here from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was finding out the presence of the virus in bats.
“There’s monumental proof that that’s the place this started,” Pompeo mentioned.
The secretary of state additionally mentioned, twice, that he had “no motive to disbelieve” that the virus was “man-made or genetically modified.” Reminded that the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence has mentioned that the scientific consensus is that it was neither, Pompeo mentioned, “That’s proper. I agree with that.”
Amid criticism of its response to the virus, the administration, with Pompeo as its level man, has mentioned that the pandemic by no means would have occurred, or wouldn’t have been so in depth, had China not “tried to hide and conceal and confuse. It employed the World Well being Group as a software to do the identical,” Pompeo mentioned.
“I feel the entire world is united in understanding that China introduced this virus to the world,” he mentioned. Requested whether or not he thought China “deliberately launched” the virus, Pompeo mentioned, “I don’t have something to say about that. I feel there’s lots to know. However I can say this. We’ve finished our greatest to try to reply all of these questions.”
Pompeo famous that American and different worldwide scientists haven’t been allowed to go to the Wuhan laboratory and that China has nonetheless not supplied a pattern of the unique virus.
“Had these scientists been working in America, they’d have put this out,” he mentioned. “There would have been an change of concepts. And we might have shortly recognized the sorts of issues that wanted to be finished in response.”