Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed to The Epoch Times on June 3 that his efforts to get to the bottom of how the CCP virus—also known as the novel coronavirus—spread from China to the United States met with sustained opposition within the U.S. government.
Asked about revelations in a June 3 Vanity Fair report that key officials deep within the State Department sought to keep the public from knowing that U.S. funds had supported gain-of-function research at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), Pompeo described a “contentious battle.”
That research, which focused on techniques for reconfiguring naturally occurring viruses to make them more virulent and transmissible to humans, was partially funded as far back as 2012 with U.S. tax dollars through the National Institutes of Health and a nonprofit foundation known as the EcoHealth Alliance.
The Vanity Fair analysis “found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step.”
“In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it,” the article reads.
China has insisted since the virus first appeared in late 2019 that it had spread from bats to humans via an open-air meat market in Wuhan. Some government and public health officials, private sector scientists, and investigative journalists, however, have said since early in 2020 that there’s substantial evidence that the virus spread somehow from the WIV.
Then-President Donald Trump and Pompeo, as well as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), publicly noted the existence of such evidence in April 2020 and called on Chinese officials to allow independent investigators to access the WIV and its records. China refused to do so.
