'Evidence’ shows covid leaked from lab in Wuhan, China

FPI / January 6, 2021

The coronavirus likely escaped via a "leak or an accident" from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, a U.S. official said.

“There is a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus,” deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger said last week during a virtual meeting with UK parliament members.

Chinese officials have insisted that the virus originated in a wet market where it jumped from a bat or pangolin to humans. The U.S. corporate media have accepted and regurgitated Chinese propaganda from the outset while ignoring the evidence that the virus escaped from a lab, likely the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Pottinger noted that "even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story."

Iain Duncan Smith, the former UK Tory Party leader who participated in the virtual meeting, said he was told the United States has "an ex-scientist from the laboratory in America at the moment. I was led to believe this is how they have been able to stiffen up their position on how this outbreak originated."

Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan, who said she did some of the earliest research on the coronavirus, has publicly claimed the virus was man-made and that the Chinese government covered up its dangers.

Pottinger's comments came as a team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) is set to travel 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," Pottinger said 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.

Smith noted that Beijing's refusal to allow journalists to visit the Wuhan laboratory only served to increase suspicion that it was "ground zero" for the pandemic.

"We don't know what they have been doing in that laboratory," Smith said. "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."

Free Press International