Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State for the United States, appeared on ABC This Week Sunday morning claiming that there is “enormous evidence” that COVID-19 originated in a biomedical testing facility in Wuhan, China. This assertion directly contradicts claims from the Chinese government, and is the latest development in escalating tensions between the two countries.
At this time, the State Department has failed to provide any indication as to what evidence they possess that suggests the virus was first transmitted in a lab. Pompeo has claimed that China’s behavior in the face of the outbreak suggests guilt, stating that they “behaved like authoritarian regimes do, attempted to conceal and hide and confuse.” China responded by releasing a statement on state run television saying that “it is only an absurd claim featuring typical U.S. bullying,” and that “like the rest of the world, China is a victim of the pandemic, not an accomplice with the virus.”
The health community general agrees that COVID-19 was first transmitted through “zoonotic spillover” which is nearly impossible to occur through a lab setting and much more likely in the wild. With this, they also assert that the virus is almost impossible to have been man made, a fact that has been accepted by both Pompeo and the Director of National Intelligence.
