Pompeo says many in NIH tried to suppress work to expose China
Trump’s Secretary of State accuses the organization of trying to hide work Trump State Department was doing
Former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused the National Institutes of Health of trying to suppress his department’s investigation into the true origins of the coronavirus pandemic, as until recently theories that the pathogen leaked from a Wuhan, China lab were often viewed as conspiratorial.
On “The Ingraham Angle,” Pompeo remarked that outside of typical pushback within his own department from people who didn’t like him or President Donald Trump, he was also dealing with “internal debate” from the National Institutes of Health.
“[NIH] folks were trying to suppress what we were doing at the State Department as well,” he said.
NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, an Obama appointee, recently said on Fox News’ “The Story” that he never ruled out a lab leak, but that it matched astrobiologist Carl Sagan’s mantra of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Pompeo also said Anthony Fauci, who runs the NIAID under the NIH umbrella, sounded like he was spreading Chinese government talking points in daytime interviews earlier Thursday:
“To hear Fauci this morning talk about how the Chinese have an interest in us discovering what happened is just crazy talk. The Chinese have a deep interest in covering it up. They have done so pretty darn effectively,” he said.
Fauci, 80, voiced “the exact same theories that the Chinese Communist Party has presented for over a year now,” said Pompeo, adding that such corollaries appear ill-timed:
“He implies good faith for the Chinese Communist Party: We are on the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square [incident] For Dr. Fauci to go out and think the CCP cared that there were people in Wuhan who were dying… is just naïve beyond all possible imagination.”
Pompeo went on to back up reporting from Vanity Fair that said a State Department official named Miles Yu, who can speak Mandarin, was actively translating and “mirroring” documentation on the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s website in order to compile a dossier of questions about its research to the secretary.
Pompeo praised Yu, a former commander at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., saying that what Yu reported was “pretty clear.
“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,” he 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,” the former Kansas congressman said.
Comments