New Sky News doco What Really Happened In Wuhan explores Covid-19 origins

China could have used an athletics event as the first ever Covid-19 superspreader event, as former US President Donald Trump told of theories he heard while in office.

A prominent Chinese defector has made the startling claim that Beijing may have used an athletics tournament to spread Covid-19 around the globe.

It comes as former US President Donald Trump, in an Australian interview, told how there were “lots of body bags” outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology late in 2019 and gave an insight into how the virus first escaped from the laboratory.

Speaking to Sky News host Sharri Markson for her new documentary, What Really Happened in Wuhan which premiered last night, Mr Trump said a leading theory was that a lab worker at the Wuhan Institute accidentally infected his girlfriend — possibly becoming the pandemic’s Patient Zero — during a lunch date.

“Zero or patient something else, but that’s one theory,” Mr Trump said.

Former US President Donald Trump interview talks to Sharri Markson for the documentary What Really Happened in Wuhan on Sky News.

While the former president was emphatic that he believed the virus escaped due to “incompetence”, others interviewed for the program revealed that it was likely born of Chinese bioweapons research.

“They’ve published papers in China about both aspects. Saying that, ‘Oh, we can weaponise coronaviruses. That actually would make a good bioweapon,” Canadian biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin, one of the first scientists to begin to float the lab leak theory last year, told Markson.

The documentary, which builds on the original reporting Markson did for The Daily Telegraph and later The Australian, also revealed that a number of Wuhan lab workers and others who were either infected or had tried to sound the alarm in the early days of the pandemic were silenced by the Chinese government or “disappeared’’.

“What I can say is that, as from the intelligence perspective, we know that some of the people that were most involved, either infected or reporting on or whistle blowing on or trying to get answers and journalists reporting on, have been difficult to track down later, at least from my time there,’’ John Ratcliffe, former US Director of National Intelligence, told Markson.

Sharri Markson, host of the Sky News documentary What Really Happened In Wuhan

“If there was really no blame … the Chinese Communist Party would not have silenced doctors and scientists and journalists and ‘disappeared’ some of them.”

Markson’s interviews with Mr Trump and others raise the prospect that defectors may have tried to warn the world of the danger posed by the coronavirus – something that former top State Department investigator David Asher said would have been akin to “stopping 9/11”.

“I know that I want to” talk about defectors, Mr Trump said, but added “I won’t really be allowed to talk (about that)”.

Markson also revealed that, by the second half of 2019, various spy agencies knew something was wrong.

“In late 2019 we have intelligence from both human intelligence sources and signals intelligence sources and other intelligence sources that were telling us that there was some sort of a problem in Wuhan,” Mr Ratcliffe said.

John Ratcliffe, the former US Director of National Intelligence, in Sky News' What Really Happened In Wuhan documentary.

It was then that the Military World Games were being held in Wuhan, which may have become the first superspreader event.

“I learned there was an unusual exercise by the Chinese government during the military games … and I knew they were doing experiments of that sort,” Chinese democracy activist and exile Wei Jinsheng said.

“I thought that the Chinese government would take this opportunity to spread the virus during the military games as many foreigners would show up there.”

Taking in the scene from Wuhan to Washington, the documentary reveals that the crisis, that has so far taken more than 4.5 million lives, is continuing to reverberate.

Sharri Markson thinks Dr Anthony Fauci has to take some of the blame for the spreading of Covid-19. Picture: AFP

And the blame game, Markson suggests, will continue to reverberate with enough blame to go around — from the deeply compromised World Health Organisation to the US agencies connected to Dr Anthony Fauci who helped fund deadly “gain of function’’ research at the Wuhan Institute.

The greatest victim of the pandemic may wind up being the regime of Xi Jinping himself, given the crisis his government’s lies and failures unleashed on the world.

Richard Dearlove, former head of the secretive British spy agency MI6, said: “I think the consequences of this will be severe politically in China over the next four or five years.’’

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it brings Xi Jinping down, or at least there isn’t a contest around his concept of leadership,” Mr Dearlove added.

The documentary What Really Happened in Wuhan is available to watch on demand on Foxtel.

Originally published as New Sky News doco What Really Happened In Wuhan explores Covid-19 origins