As senior U.S. officials prepare to meet with their Chinese counterparts for their first face-to-face meeting during the Biden administration, the former chief State Department investigator who oversaw the Task Force on the origin of the COVID-19 virus says Fox News that not only does he believe the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that it could have been the result of research that the Chinese military, or the People’s Liberation Army, was doing on a biological weapon.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institutes of Health,” David Asher, now a senior member of the Hudson Institute, told Fox News in an exclusive interview. “It operates a secret, classified program. In my opinion and I am just a person, my opinion is that it was a biological weapons program. ”
Asher has long been a money-seeking guy who has worked on some of the most classified intelligence investigations for the State Department and the Treasury under both Democratic and Republican administration. He led the team that discovered the international nuclear procurement network led by Pakistan’s nuclear program father, AQ Khan, and discovered key parts of North Korea’s secret uranium enrichment. He believes the Chinese Communist Party has been involved in massive coverage for the past 14 months.
“And if you think, like me, that it could have been a broken weapon vector, not deliberately released, but developing and then somehow leaked, it turned out to be the biggest weapon in the world. history, ”Asher said during a panel discussion at the Hudson Institute: The Origins of COVID-19: Political Implications and Lessons for the Future. “You have taken out between 15 and 20% of global GDP. You killed millions of people. The Chinese population has been barely affected. Their economies have returned to the number one position in the entire G20. “
Asher says the Chinese government’s behavior reminds him of other criminal investigations he has overseen.
“The motive, the concealment, the conspiracy, all the characteristics of guilt are associated with this. And the fact that the initial group of victims surrounded the very institute that made the research extremely dangerous, if not dubious, is significant, ”said Asher, who hired the Chinese government as the state department’s chief representative during the 2003 SARS outbreak.
At first, China said that the COVID-19 virus came from the Wuhan seafood market – but the problem with China’s theory: the first case had nothing to do with the market. Last fall, the United States obtained information that there was an outbreak among several scientists in the Wuhan laboratory with flu-like symptoms, who left them hospitalized in November 2019 – before China reported its first case. Asher and other experts in the Hudson Institute group said that in 2007, China announced that it would begin work on biological genetic weapons using controversial “functional gain” research to make viruses more lethal.
The Chinese stopped talking publicly about their research at the laboratory in Wuhan in 2016. This, Asher believes, is the time when the People’s Liberation Army intervened and moved from biodefense research to bio-crime. In the same year, China’s leading state television commentator
“We entered an area of the Chinese war, including using things like viruses. That is, they made a public statement to their people that this is a new priority in Xi’s national security policy, “Asher said.
The Chinese, according to Asher, stopped talking publicly about research into “vectors of coronavirus disease that could be used for weapons” in 2017, at the same time his army began funding research at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.
“I doubt it’s a coincidence,” Asher said.
Meanwhile, US researchers in the field of biological weapons continue to focus on older biological weapons, such as anthrax. A turning point in the search for a defense against biological weapons with coronavirus included controversial research on “functional gain” and a discovery in the Netherlands that surprised the scientific community by surprise.
“I remember being at a meeting in The Hague with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the day the news broke that a Dutch laboratory funded by the National Institutes of Health was making a gain of functional research into highly pathogenic avian influenza,” especially to increase the transmissibility of the very dangerous influenza virus, ”said Andy Weber, former deputy secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs under President Obama.
The Obama administration quickly imposed a moratorium on this type of research, fearing it could become a playing card for terrorists. The Trump administration lifted the moratorium in 2017, but stopped NIH funding to the Wuhan lab in April 2020, after the pandemic began.
According to experts, biosafety has long been a concern for level 4 biosafety laboratories in China.
“China has been involved in this type of virus research since 2003, the outbreak of SARS,” said Miles Yu, a State Department official who co-wrote a recent WSJ opinion with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the virus. origin. “China’s biosecurity standard is really low and very dangerous. So this is an accident waiting to happen. ”
When the WHO team sent to Wuhan in February visited the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, they did not wear biosecurity suits and spent 3 hours indoors, but according to reports, they did not have access to scientists or data they had. need to completely rule out that the virus has escaped from the laboratory.
At the time, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said, “It should be noted that the traceability of the virus is a complex scientific issue and we need to provide enough space for experts to conduct scientific research.” He added: “China will continue to cooperate with WHO in an open, transparent and accountable manner and will contribute to better prevent future risks and protect the lives and health of people in all countries.”