A new intelligence report surfaced this morning that explains why China repeatedly lied about the virus outbreak that spread from Wuhan across the globe.
The Associated Press reported that U.S. intelligence officials believe the Chinese hid the severity of the outbreak so that they could hoard medical supplies.
That report came a day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said U.S. intelligence officials possess strong evidence the virus originated in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The latest developments fortify reports that China hid the truth about the pandemic from the world — then watched as the dangerous pathogen infected and killed more than a quarter-million people, and wrecked a thriving U.S. economy.
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Hoarding Supplies
The remarkable assessment of why the Chinese hid the truth shows up in an intelligence report from the Department of Homeland Security.
“U.S. officials believe China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak — and how contagious the disease is — to stock up on medical supplies needed to respond to it, intelligence documents show,” AP reported.
Chinese leaders “intentionally concealed the severity” of the pandemic from the world in early January, according to a four-page Department of Homeland Security intelligence report dated May 1. … The revelation comes as the Trump administration has intensified its criticism of China, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying Sunday that that country was responsible for the spread of disease and must be held accountable. …
Not classified but marked “for official use only,” the DHS analysis states that, while downplaying the severity of the coronavirus, China increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies. It attempted to cover up doing so by “denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data,” the analysis states.
The report also says China held off informing the World Health Organization that the coronavirus “was a contagion” for much of January so it could order medical supplies from abroad — and that its imports of face masks and surgical gowns and gloves increased sharply.
Those conclusions are based on the 95-percent probability that China’s changes in import and export behavior were not within normal range, according to the report.
Originated in Lab
That report aside, Pompeo’s remarks also suggest that China lied about the origin of the virus, as Fox News reported in mid-April.
On ABC’s This Week, Pompeo said the virus did not likely emerge from Wuhan’s wet markets, where merchants retail exotic animals and pets for human consumption, including bats, dogs, and cats.
“There’s enormous evidence” the virus came from the lab in Wuhan, he said. “We’ve said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outset, but I think the whole world can see now.”
Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab….
I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.
As The New American reported yesterday, citing John Roberts of Fox News, the majority of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies believe the virus inadvertently leaked from a lab at the virus institute.
That fact supports what Fox reported in mid-April: U.S. intelligence officials told Brett Baer that the virus did not, as China claimed, originate in the wet markets, but instead in a lab where it jumped from a bat to a technician, who then spread the virus in Wuhan.
Fauci: China Lied
U.S. taxpayers have been subsidizing controversial gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan virus institute through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a subsidiary of the National Institutes for Health, Newsweek reported last week. One of President Trump’s top coronavirus advisors, Dr. Anthony Fauci, is the institute’s director. Fox News disclosed tax subsidies in mid-April.
U.S. science diplomats who visited the lab were highly concerned that lab technicians were improperly trained, the Washington Post reported.
For his part, Fauci confirmed in early April that the Chinese lied about the nature of the virus. “It became clear that what the Chinese had claimed originally, that this was just a virus that jumped from an animal reservoir to a human, and wasn’t being transmitted from human to human, well, it became very clear pretty quickly that that was not the case,” he said.
China lied, low-balling the number of infections and the ensuing fatalities.
Image: Irina Shatilova / iStock / Getty Images Plus
