NatSec Adviser: Coronavirus Almost Certainly Leaked From Wuhan Lab

In a very revealing conversation with British officials this weekend, U.S. National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger said that intelligence points to the coronavirus having originated in a Wuhan laboratory and not the wet markets as the world thought for so long. In a Zoom call, Pottinger said, “There is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus.”

Pottinger told the British legislators that neither the U.S. nor the UK could afford to take seriously the investigations being performed by the World Health Organization.

“MPs around the world have a moral role to play in exposing the WHO investigation as a Potemkin exercise,” Pottinger said. “Even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story.”

Pinpointing the origin of the virus as a lab leak is not the same as saying it was madmade, which is a theory that has been widely dismissed by public health officials and scientists. However, even if the virus is naturally-occuring, putting the blame on the Wuhan lab changes things considerably. It’s one thing to blame the CCP for their failure to impose stricter health requirements on the open-air wet markets in Wuhan. It’s quite another to identify a serious security lapse at a major disease laboratory.

In remarks to the Daily Mail, former Tory Party leader Iain Duncan Smith said that UK officials have every reason to take seriously the possibility that China allowed this virus to escape from their lab.

“I was told the US have an ex-scientist from the laboratory in America at the moment,” Smith said. “That was what I heard a few weeks ago. I was led to believe this is how they have been able to stiffen up their position on how this outbreak originated.

“The truth is there are people who have been in those labs who maintain that this is the case,” Smith continued. “We don’t know what they have been doing in that laboratory. They may well have been fiddling with bat coronaviruses and looking at them and they made a mistake. I’ve spoken to various people who believe that to be the case.”

Chinese officials, meanwhile, continue to insist that the virus came neither from the wet markets nor the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In an interview with NBC News this summer, the lab’s vice director said that scientists at the facility only got samples of the virus after the disease had begun to spread.

“I have repeatedly emphasized that it was on Dec. 30 that we got contact with the samples of SARS-like pneumonia or pneumonia of unknown cause sent from the hospital,” he said. “We have not encountered the novel coronavirus before that, and without this virus, there is no way that it is leaked from the lab.”

Unfortunately, due to the closed nature of China’s government (and the placating nature of our incoming president), we may never know the truth for sure. Which, of course, makes it ever more likely that this will happen again.