As top US officials prepare to meet their Chinese counterparts at their first face-to-face meeting during the Biden administration, the former State Department principal investigator who oversaw the Task Force on the origin of the COVID-19 virus told the Fox News that he not only believes the virus escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but may have been the result of research that the Chinese military, or the People’s Liberation Army, was doing with a biological weapon.
“The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not the National Institute of Health,” David Asher, now a senior member of the Hudson Institute, told Fox News in an exclusive interview. “I was operating a classified and secret program. In my opinion, and I’m just a person, my opinion is that it was a biological weapons program. “
Asher has long been a “money-tracking” guy who has worked on some of the most confidential intelligence investigations for the State Department and the Treasury under the Democratic and Republican governments. He led the team that discovered the international nuclear procurement network run by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, AQ Khan, and discovered important parts of North Korea’s secret uranium enrichment. He believes that the Chinese Communist Party has been involved in a major cover-up during the past 14 months.
“And if you believe, like me, that this may have been a vector of weapons that went wrong, it was not deliberately released, but in development and somehow leaked, it ended up becoming the greatest weapon in history,” said Asher during a panel discussion at the Hudson Institute: The origins of COVID-19: Policy implications and lessons for the future. “You took 15 to 20 percent of the global GDP. You killed millions of people. The Chinese population was hardly affected. Their savings have returned to number one in the entire G20. “
Asher says the Chinese government’s behavior reminds him of other criminal investigations he oversaw.
“Motive, cover-up, conspiracy, all marks of guilt are associated with that. And the fact that the initial group of victims surrounded the very institute that was doing the highly dangerous, if not doubtful, research is significant, ”said Asher, who hired the Chinese government as the main representative of the State Department during the SARS outbreak. in 2003.
At first, China said that the COVID-19 virus originated at the Wuhan Seafood Market – but the problem with China’s theory: the first case had no connection with the market. Last fall, the U.S. obtained information indicating that there was an outbreak among several Wuhan laboratory scientists with flu-like symptoms that left them hospitalized in November 2019 – before China reported its first case. Asher and the other experts at the Hudson Institute panel said that in 2007, China announced that it would start working on genetic bio-weapons using controversial “function gain” research to make viruses more lethal.
The Chinese stopped talking publicly about their research at the Wuhan laboratory in 2016. It was then, Asher believes, that the People’s Liberation Army intervened and moved from bio-defense to bio-offensive research. In the same year, China’s leading state television commentator
“We entered an area of Chinese biological warfare, including the use of things like viruses. I mean, they made a public statement to their people that this is a new priority in Xi’s national security policy, ”says Asher.
The Chinese, according to Asher, stopped talking publicly about the coronavirus “disease vectors that could be used for weapons” research in 2017, while their military began funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. .
“I doubt it’s a coincidence,” said Asher.
Meanwhile, US biological weapons researchers are still focused primarily on older biological weapons, such as anthrax. A crucial point in the search for how to defend against coronavirus bioarms included the controversial “gain in function” research and a breakthrough in the Netherlands that took the scientific community by surprise.
“I remember that I was at a meeting in The Hague with the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs the day the news broke that a laboratory in the Netherlands financed by the National Institutes of Health was conducting a function gain research on highly pathogenic avian influenza , specifically to increase the transmissibility of this dangerous flu virus, ”recalled Andy Weber, former Deputy Defense Secretary for President Obama’s Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs.
The Obama administration quickly imposed a moratorium on this type of research, fearing it could become a handbook for terrorists. The Trump administration suspended the moratorium in 2017, but suspended NIH funding to the Wuhan lab in April 2020, after the pandemic began.
Biosafety has been a concern over China’s level 4 biosafety laboratories, according to experts.
“China has been involved in this type of virus research since 2003, the SARS outbreak,” according to Miles Yu, the State Department official who wrote a recent WSJ article with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about the virus origins. “China’s biosafety standard is very low and very dangerous. So this is an accident waiting to happen. ”
When the team sent by WHO to Wuhan in February visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they did not wear biosafety clothes and spent 3 hours inside, but according to reports they did not have access to the scientists or data they needed to discard it entirely. the virus escaped the laboratory.
At the time, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said: “It should be noted that traceability of the virus 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 responsible manner and to make its contribution to better preventing future risks and protecting the lives and health of people in all countries.”