Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday he faced pushback into probing the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus from both within his agency and from the National Institutes of Health.
"[NIH] folks were trying to suppress what we were doing at the State Department as well," he told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle,” adding that this was in addition to the pushback he normally received at the State Department from those who were against him and former President Trump.
NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, however, recently said that he did not dismiss the possibility of a lab leak.
Mike Pompeo says many in NIH tried to suppress work to expose China. pic.twitter.com/jS8XsQCjmL
— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) June 4, 2021
Pompeo said that while China “has no desire for the world to know what happened,” there is already a great deal that is known about what was taking place at the Wuhan lab.
"We know there was gain-of-function research, that this lab was Level 4 and had security leaks before,” he said. "We know there were doctors who became ill and were hospitalized in the fall of 2019. What was the Chinese Communist Party's intention?"
He continued: "We know there was military activity taking place at the same laboratory.
"We don't know what they were doing but we do know that they don't want you to know.
"That suggests we should give them no benefit of the doubt. They could clear this all up in a minute if they wanted to.
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"When we get to the end of this, we will have demonstrated that the Chinese knew what had happened and their virology lab was at the center of it."
Pompeo also praised Miles Yu, a former commander at the U.S. Naval Academy, who after translating documentation on the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website, compiled a dossier of questions about its research.
"When I received that [dossier] it was in early May [2020]. I was on TV talking about what I could get declassified at that point. We worked diligently to get them to declassify more," Pompeo said.
"[Then-DNI Director John Ratcliffe] was a great partner in trying to do that. But there were folks all over the community who did not want to talk about this … who did not want the world to know the Chinese Communist Party was in the process of covering up several million losses of life.”
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