U.S. diplomats and officials at the Beijing Embassy had been aware of the research on bat coronaviruses being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in late 2017, prompting an alert to Washington, D.C., two years before the coronavirus pandemic began to spread that the lab’s own scientists were reporting a “serious shortage” of technicians and investigators who could safely operate the facility, according to a new book.
Their cables were ignored, writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in his book, “Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century,” which is being released Tuesday.
According to an excerpt of the book posted on Politico Monday, outgoing President Donald Trump’s State Department released a statement on Jan. 15, during the last days of the administration, claiming that the intelligence community had evidence that researchers at the WIV laboratory had been sickened with COVID-19 symptoms in autumn 2019 and that the lab had been conducting research with the Chinese military despite its appearances as a “civilian institution.”
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{Matzav.com}
Sadly, the response of Donald Trump was to eliminate the position of the epidemiologist who was embedded in China’s disease control agency whose job was to keep tabs on stuff like this. This was done in July 2019. From January 24, 2020, to February 29, 2020, Trump would repeatedly praise Xi Jinping and the Chinese government for its handing of the coronavirus.