‘Like stopping 9/11 before it happened’: US officials missed vital Wuhan virus warning

US officials missed a significant warning that coronavirus was rife in Wuhan months before it went global.

US authorities were alerted by a key Chinese defector that a virus was spreading in Wuhan, months before the pandemic smashed the rest of the world — but they missed the significance of the warning.

Now the State Department official who led an investigation into the origins of Covid-19 has compared the dropped opportunity to “stopping 9/11 before it happened”.

David Asher’s frank acknowledgment comes in a hard-hitting Sky News documentary examining the truth of how the pandemic began, called What Really Happened In Wuhan.

Early warning ... Chinese defector Wei Jingheng tells how he raised the alarm on Sky News documentary What Really Happened In Wuhan.

Mr Asher tells host Sharri Markson, who has written a book of the same name, that the US Government had other pieces of early-warning evidence in late 2019 but it failed to connect the dots.

“Where I was shocked was, we could have known in November of 2019, that there was a disaster occurring inside Wuhan. Inside their most important biological facilities related to coronavirus research,” he says.

“It was something absolutely tragic, traumatic and dramatic that was occurring and we could have reacted to it. The whole world could have been different. It would have been like stopping 9/11 before it happened” — a reference to the devastating terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed thousands in America and changed the world.

Investigating the pandemic ... Sharri Markson is hosting a documentary and is about to release a book on What Really Happened In Wuhan.

Ms Markson, an award-winning investigative reporter with The Australian, has also spoken to the Chinese dissident who warned senior American figures that a virus was rife in Wuhan back in November 2019.

Former Communist insider Wei Jingsheng, who made headlines when he defected to the US in 1997, told Ms Markson he first heard about a new, mysterious virus at the time of the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

The pro-democracy activist said he had been tipped off by high-level contacts in Beijing and that he warned US politicians — including one, who he does not name, connected to the President — and Washington-based Chinese human rights activist, Dimon Liu.

Asked if he felt his information was being taken seriously, Mr Wei said: “I felt they were not as heavily concerned as I was.”

Lifting the lid on a crisis ... the book, out this month.

In the Sky documentary, which airs on Monday, Mr Asher says he was shocked to learn “we actually could have had foreknowledge” of the coronavirus, which has killed 4.6 million people and continues rampaging around the globe.

China only admitted Covid-19 was contagious in late January, 2020 — two months after Mr Wei’s warning.

Ms Markson has spoken to a host of international intelligence leaders and senior politicians for the documentary and the book, which is published by HarperCollins on September 29.

They include former US President Donald Trump, who is quizzed on-air by the journalist about his administration’s response to the crisis and his own beliefs around the disease.

The show: What Really Happened In Wuhan airs on Sky News at 8pm AEST on Monday, September 20.

The book: What Really Happened In Wuhan, by Sharri Markson, is on sale September 29 and is available for pre-order now.

Great escape ... Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng outside his Beijing home, during a brief period of freedom between prison spells for defying the government, before he fled to the US in the 1990s.