World faces new pandemic outbreaks from Chinese labs, Mike Pompeo declares

Continued biological weapon research in Chinese labs keeps the threat of global pandemics just as deadly as COVID-19 at large, one former Trump official has warned.

The continued research of biological weapons undertaken in Chinese labs keeps the threat of new global pandemics just as deadly as COVID-19 at large, one former US secretary of state has declared.

Speaking to The Weekend Australian in a wide-ranging interview, Mike Pompeo, who served under Donald Trump, said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “continues to engage in this sort of biological research”.

“The risk of this sort of thing happening again from a Chinese facility is real and significant,” Mr Pompeo said.

“We can see in the millions of lives lost and the billions of dollars of wealth that’s been destroyed, the world must make sure that this does not happen again.”

While he doesn’t think Chinese authorities intentionally leaked COVID-19, Mr Pompeo, along with the former president and other members of the Trump administration, has long perpetuated the belief that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

A joint World Health Organisation (WHO)/China investigation into the origins of the disease — which has infected close to 130 million people around the world since first emerging in Wuhan in late 2019, and killed more than 2.8 million others — first worked to dispel this line of thinking, dismissing a laboratory leak as “extremely unlikely”.

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The continued research of biological weapons undertaken in Chinese labs keeps the threat of new global pandemics just as deadly as COVID-19 at large, Mike Pompeo has declared. Picture: Andrew Harnik/POOL/AFP

A joint World Health Organisation investigation into the origins of the disease worked to dispel this line of thinking, dismissing a laboratory leak as “extremely unlikely”. Picture: Hector Retamal/AFP

The WHO’s report into the origins of COVID-19 found that it “most likely arose in bats, and then spread to humans via an as-yet unidentified intermediary animal”, Australia’s Professor Dominic Dwyer, who participated in the investigation, wrote for The Conversation this week.

“The evidence we have so far indicates the virus was possibly circulating in China in mid-to-late November 2019. We considered viral escape from a laboratory extremely unlikely.”

Following the release of the investigation’s initial findings, though, concerns were voiced by the United States, United Kingdom and Australia, among others, about whether the WHO had been given access to all the data — with critics slamming the report as a “whitewash”.

Speaking on Today at the time, Nationals Senator Matt Canavan said China acted like it had “something to hide”, adding he was not surprised that it was hard to find the virus’ origins a year after the pandemic began.

“We needed this inquiry to start pretty much straight away if there was any hope of finding conclusions and it hasn’t,” he said.

“Through this whole process, China’s acted like it had something to hide and it has frustrated the inquiry, dragged it out.”

Mr Canavan said that while the world would benefit from knowing where COVID-19 came from so it could be prevented, “we will probably never know because China has not been fully transparent with the world”.

On Wednesday, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, long accused of complacency towards Beijing, urged a further investigation into the laboratory leak theory while rebuking China for sitting on key data.

“Although the team has concluded that a laboratory leak is the least likely hypothesis, this requires further investigation,” he said.

“I expect further collaborative studies to include more timely and comprehensive data sharing.”

Mr Tedros said the probe into Wuhan’s virology labs had not gone far enough, adding that he was prepared to launch a fresh investigation, while calling on China to be more forthcoming with data.

“I do not believe that this assessment was extensive enough,” he told the United Nations health agency’s 194 member states, in a briefing on the COVID origins report.

The call, echoed by countries including America, Britain and Japan, was met with anger by China — the editor of the CCP-backed Global Times lashing out at the US on Twitter, writing that the “spirit of science” there “has died”.

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A worker inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of China's Hubei province. Picture: Johannes Eisele/AFP

Unfounded claims that COVID-19 is “an unrestricted bioweapon” and the global pandemic is a result of “unrestricted biowarfare” have also circulated, including by a group of Chinese virologists linked to former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.

But last August, doctor and biodefence expert Dr Mark Kortepeter, threw cold water on the theory that the virus’ release was a deliberate act of bioterrorism by China, writing in Forbes that while COVID-19 “has some ‘desirable’ properties as a bioweapon, probably not enough to make it a good choice for military purposes”.

“Regardless, it has certainly reminded us of our vulnerabilities as a society to a new pathogen, and how crippling a pandemic can be, as we continue to watch the entire world grappling with how to contain it,” he wrote.

“The other important thing this pandemic has demonstrated is that once the genie escapes the bottle, it is nearly impossible to put it back in. We lose control and the results are unpredictable … It is only a matter of time until we face this type of challenge again — either from mother nature or an adversary.

“Now is time to shore up the vulnerabilities in our preparedness and response that this pandemic has laid bare. Time is not on our side.”