A new U.S. intelligence report reveals how three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China reported getting severely sick in November 2019, warranting hospital care. This adds to further speculation on the true origins of COVID-19, which to this day has not been determined despite inquiries launched by the World Health Organization.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the new intelligence emerged from a State Department fact sheet that was issued during the final days of Donald Trump's presidency. The report showed that several Wuhan researchers at the virology lab, which was known to conduct coronavirus studies, experienced "symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."
The WSJ report was published on Sunday, just a day ahead of a meeting called by the World Health Organization as they gear up for the next phase of investigation into the true origins of COVID-19. In the meantime, China insists that COVID-19 may have been transmitted through cold food storage and packaging, a theory that has been shot down by microbiologist Emanuel Goldman at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.
"China hasn't had any reports of consumers, of even suspicion, of consumers being infected by this route," Goldman told NPR in February. "It's very unlikely that you would get the virus from food. SARS-CoV-2 is a virus you get by breathing."
When asked about the report detailing how Wuhan researchers sought hospital care before the COVID-19 outbreak began in December, a National Security Council spokeswoman told Reuters that the Biden administration had "serious questions about the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, including its origins within the People's Republic of China" and that the U.S. is committed to working with WHO and other countries to launch an independent, unbiased investigation into the origins of COVID-19 that is "free from interference or politicization."
America's top infectious disease doctor, Anthony Fauci, agrees. Dr. Fauci admitted that he is "not convinced" that COVID-19 had a natural origin. He told Politifact's Katie Sanders at a virtual event, "We should continue to investigate what went on in China until we continue to find out to the best of our ability what happened."
China negated any claims about a lab origin that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that the U.S. through Western media "continues to hype the lab leak theory," Newsmax reported. China's foreign ministry, in typical Chinese Communist Party fashion, tried to downplay the credible allegations by asking, "Is [the U.S.] actually concerned about tracing the source or trying to divert attention?"
But the intelligence showing how Wuhan researchers sought hospital care way before COVID-19 became a global pandemic is described by a U.S. official as "of exquisite quality" and "very precise," but did not shed light on "exactly why they got sick."
Coincidentally, the intelligence aligns with what many epidemiologists and virologists believe: that COVID-19 had already circulated in Wuhan in China as early as November 2019. Even China's own Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has data proving this to be true.
