“The Chinese Communist party has gone into full cover-up mode,” Pompeo said.
By World Israel News Staff
In an exclusive interview with former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss on Tuesday, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he thinks the Covid-19 virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China “and have for quite some time.”
“It was last spring that I first articulated what we knew, what we didn’t know, and it’s the case that we don’t know a heck of a lot more than what we knew then,” Pompeo said. “The Chinese Communist party has gone into full cover-up mode.”
“But if you stare at the evidence that has accumulated to date, it points to a single direction of a laboratory leak from a place called the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a place where the Chinese were engaged in some complicated viral research,” he said.
Pompeo admitted, “I can’t lay down the proof for you. I can certainly do what we’ve done in terms of getting declassified information out to the American public.” He said it was up to China to release the data and show who ‘Patient Zero’ was and prove where it began. “They have a responsibility to the world to do so.”
“The risk that something like this can happen again is greatly increased if we don’t know how the Wuhan virus escaped China to come and kill 3 million people around the world,” Pompeo said.
Weiss, in an introduction to the interview, says she was prompted to ask the question about the origins of Covid-19 because the legacy media until recently refused to discuss the issue.
She writes, “At The New York Times, as Donald McNeil points out in a post just published on Medium, staff was hamstrung. Sources in the Trump administration posited the lab leak theory, so it must be untrue, thought reporters and editors. Epidemiologists cast doubt on it, so it couldn’t be true.”
“To run an op-ed or news piece speculating or theorizing or reporting on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in a lab was considered dangerous. A path not to be tread. So, at least at The Times, it wasn’t,” she says.
“This is very troubling, but it is also, at this stage, unsurprising. On so many topics, the legacy press has forcibly limited the scope of legitimate discussion. The downstream effect of this is is as obvious as it is alarming: It denigrates trust in institutions that are meant to be in the business of pursuing the truth.”
Pompeo said, “Those of us who simply, and I don’t claim to know the answer, even today just trying to lay out the facts and data in a way with a reasonable hypothesis are still often accused of behaving in a way that’s inconsistent with good company at a cocktail party.”