A State Department official who led a Trump-era investigation into COVID-19 revealed that a Wuhan lab researcher's wife may have died of COVID-19 before China announced the existence of the deadly disease, causing some to speculate that it may have been an early indication that the virus can be transmitted among humans.
This contradicts early reports from Chinese authorities that claimed the virus was not transmissible about 30 days before they recognized that it did, thus allowing it to spread in Wuhan, ground zero for what would become a global pandemic.
According to WND, State Department investigator David Asher led the Trump-era investigations into the origins of COVID-19. He had served the State Department for years, under the administrations of both Democratic and Republican presidents. Under his leadership, the team of investigators also considered COVID-19's natural origins, which has long been the main theory pushed by health authorities worldwide.
Asher said, however, that the viruses developed in the Wuhan virology lab "were not similar to anything [to] what could occur in natural evolution," the New York Post reported. "I had biostatisticians at one of our national labs calculate the odds of this evolving in nature and it was like 1 in 13 million, and then they revised it to about 1 in 13 billion," Asher added.
"To say this came out of a zoonotic situation is sort of ridiculous," Asher argued. Now, more and more reports have come to light that support the controversial Wuhan lab leak theory. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported how a U.S. intelligence report revealed several Wuhan researchers fell ill with symptoms similar to COVID-19, so much so that they needed medical attention.
Now, Asher is revealing how one of their investigations have found that a Wuhan lab researcher's wife actually died from what appeared to be COVID-19 in November 2019, right around the time when several Wuhan researchers fell ill and sought hospital care.
Asher argued that Wuhan lab researchers "are almost certainly getting flu shots" so it was doubtful that those 30 to 40 year old researchers would get sick with influenza and require hospital care. He believes it's more likely they got actual COVID-19 instead of the regular flu. Asher argued, "What are the odds that several workers-who happen to be the researchers on enhancing the pathogenicity of COV RaTG13 and associated COVS all fall very sick together?"
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced that he ordered the Intelligence Community for a follow up on the initial COVID-19 report that would help determine the true origins of the virus. He said in a statement that the U.S. Intelligence Community had "coalesced around two likely scenarios" but that most of them "do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other." President Biden has ordered a report that would result in a "definitive conclusion" within 90 days. The U.S. continues to call for a "full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation" into the origins of COVID-19.
