As top U.S. officials prepare to meet with their Chinese counterparts for their first face-to-face meeting during the Biden administration, the former State Department chief investigator overseeing the task force on the origin of the virus COVID-19 tells Fox News that not only does he believe the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but that it may have been the result of research that the Chinese Army or Army Liberation of the People was done with 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 in an exclusive interview, told Fox News. “It operated a secret and classified program. In my opinion, and I am a single person, I think it was a biological weapons program. “
Asher has long been a money-tracking guy who has worked on some of the top-rated intelligence investigations for the State Department of Finance, both in Democratic and Republican administrations. He led the team that discovered the international nuclear purchasing network run 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 a mass cover-up for the past 14 months.
“And if you believe, like me, that it could have been a worn-out weapon vector, not deliberately released, but in development and somehow leaked, it has become the greatest weapon in history,” he said. Asher during a roundtable discussion at the Hudson Institute: The Origins of COVID-19: Political Implications and Lessons for the Future. “You have taken 15 to 20 percent of world GDP. You have killed millions of people. The Chinese population has barely been affected. Their economies were once again number one in the entire G20. “
Asher says the Chinese government’s behavior reminds him of other criminal investigations he has overseen.
“Reason, concealment, conspiracy, all the characteristics of guilt are associated with this. And the fact that the initial group of victims surrounded the same institute that was doing the highly dangerous, if not dubious, investigation 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 originated in the Wuhan Seafood Market, but the problem with China’s theory: the first case had no connection to the market. Last fall, the U.S. obtained intelligence indicating that there was an outbreak among several scientists in Wuhan’s laboratory with flu-like symptoms that left them hospitalized in November 2019, before China reported its first case. Asher and other experts on the Hudson Institute panel said that in 2007, China announced that it would begin work on genetic biological weapons through controversial research on “function gain” to make viruses more lethal.
The Chinese stopped talking publicly about their research in the Wuhan lab in 2016. It was, according to Asher, that the People’s Liberation Army intervened and moved from biodefense research to biooffense. The same year, China’s top state television commentator
“We have entered an area of Chinese warfare, including the use of things such as viruses. I mean, they made a public statement to their people that this is a new priority under Xi’s national security policy, ”Asher notes.
According to Asher, the Chinese stopped talking publicly about coronavirus research “disease vectors that could be used for weapons” in 2017, at the same time as their military began funding research at the Institute of Virology of Wuhan.
“I doubt it’s a coincidence,” Asher said.
Meanwhile, U.S. researchers in biological weapons still focus primarily on ancient weapons such as anthrax. A key turning point in the search for how to defend against biological weapons of the coronavirus included a controversial investigation into the “gain of function” and an advance in the Netherlands that surprised the scientific community.
“I remember being at the Hague meeting with the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs the day the news broke that a laboratory in the Netherlands funded by the National Institutes of Health was conducting an investigation into the function of highly pathogenic avian influenza, specifically to increase the transmissibility of this very dangerous influenza virus, “recalled 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 such investigations, for fear that it would become a playbook for terrorists. The Trump administration lifted the moratorium in 2017, but stopped NIH funding at the Wuhan lab in April 2020 after the pandemic began.
Biosafety has long been a concern for Chinese biosafety level 4 laboratories, according to experts.
“China has been involved in this type of virus research since 2003, SARS outbreak,” according to Miles Yu, the State Department official who wrote a recent opinion to the WSJ with former Secretary of State Mike Pumping over the virus. origins. “China’s biosafety standard is really low and very dangerous. So it’s an accident waiting to happen. ”
When the WHO-sent team in Wuhan visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in February, they put on no biosecurity suits and spent 3 hours indoors, but reportedly had no access to scientists. nor to the data they needed to completely rule out that the virus escaped the lab.
At the time, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said, “It should be noted that virus traceability 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 help to better prevent future risks and protect the lives and health of people in all countries.”