John Ransom, Headline USA – A recently released State Department memo from early in the pandemic acknowledged that the most likely origin of the COVID-19 virus was a Chinese biomedical research lab, such as the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“The Wuhan labs remained the most likely yet least probed,” said the unclassified report revealed by the Epoch Times.
“All other possible places of virus’s origin have been proven false, it added. “WCDC and WIV are least scrutinized and remain mysterious.”
While the so-called lab-leak theory has gained increasing traction, it has never been formally acknowledged by US or global health officials as the source of the China-borne pandemic.
Moreover, former President Donald Trump’s promotion of the theory led leftist media and social media to agressively censor any discussion of it during the Trump administration, with the now-debunked stigma of COVID “misinformation” still lingering over factually accurate reporting.
The State Department memo written in April 2020, listed five different possible explanations for the origin of the virus:
- a Wuhan seafood or wet market
- other provinces in China
- the possibility that the outbreak initially occurred in Italy or the United States (as had been spread by Chinese propaganda)
- an undetermined origin
- the bio labs located in Wuhan
Initially, Peter Ben Embarek, the lead investigator for the World Health Organization, felt that the bio labs were the most logical origin of the contagion—a suspicion that he shared with a Danish TV crew, said Epoch Times.
However, in his public report Embarek pointed to a probable natural origin, likely due to delicate political considerations amid pressure from the Chinese communist government.
The CCP’s propaganda notwithstanding, China’s suspicious cover-up efforts in immediate wake of the virus lend some credence to the belief that the virus leaked from the labs.
“The most logical place to investigate the virus origin has been completely sealed off from outside inquiry by the CCP,” said the memo explaining why suspicion would focus on the labs.
On Jan. 1, 2020, China issued a gag order to the WIV and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, and a major-general from the Chinese army took over operations of the lab, the memo noted.
It also pointed out State Department cables as early as 2018 warned about unsafe conditions at the labs.
Wu Xiaohua, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in California, flagged several violations that could lead to outside transmission of the lab’s viral specimens, according to the memo.
Among them:
- Workers apparently sold virus-carrying animals as pets
- Deceased animals were not properly cremated and disposed of but were left out
- Lab workers routinely boiled and ate eggs from animals at the lab
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