Chinese leaders knew about Covid-19 in late 2019, Mike Pompeo says

Intelligence suggests Chinese Communist Party leaders covered up the Wuhan outbreak, the former US secretary of state has revealed.

Mike Pompeo on Sky News for Sharri Markson documentary, What Really Happened In Wuhan.

Intelligence suggests Chinese Communist Party leaders knew about the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan in the northern autumn of 2019 and deliberately covered it up, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has revealed.

He has also claimed the White House’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, did not canvas the Trump administration widely before funding coronavirus research in China.

In an exclusive interview that features in The Australian’s podcast What Really Happened in Wuhan, Mr Pompeo said US funding of this research in China, if it was designed as a workaround to the ban on risky gain-of-function research on American soil, was “unlawful”.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, other Communist Party leaders and even medical officials covered up the existence of the outbreak in Wuhan until the World Health Organisation found out about it from social media chatter in the final days of 2019.

There is evidence, Mr Pompeo claims, that points to leaders inside the Communist Party discovering the virus was spreading months earlier.

“If you were to ask Mike what his judgment is, I think leaders inside of the CCP knew about this in the fall of 2019 and that the most senior leaders in the Chinese Communist Party knew about this by the end of (2019),” he said.

However, he conceded it was “possible” Mr Xi may not have known about the coronavirus at that early stage.

There may have been “confusion” or “mixed signals” in the Communist Party structure, he said. “It’s also the case that you aren’t rewarded inside of the CCP for bringing bad news to the boss.

“I don’t want to talk about specific intelligence but I always am ­careful about the things I say I can publicly tell you with certainty.

“It’s possible Xi Jinping himself might not well have known about the scope and the scale, the transmissibility and the lethality of this virus until a little bit after many of his professionals inside the medical establishment who frankly wanted to work with the US.”

This cover-up, Mr Pompeo ­alleges, is in itself a “crime”.

“If it were the case that we were doing this to try and make that lab more safe and more secure and reduce the risk of precisely what we saw in this pandemic, one could make the case for that (funding coronavirus research in China),” he said.

“But if in fact that money was going to avoid US regulations to try and conduct research there that we couldn’t do here, or couldn’t do any place else, if this was being used as a workaround, it is entirely inappropriate.

“Indeed, it may well be unlawful under US law.”

In the interview, which was originally recorded for the What Really Happened in Wuhan book and documentary, Mr Pompeo also hits out at the mainstream media’s role in furthering the Chinese propaganda surrounding the origins of Covid-19 at the expense of uncovering the truth.

“Our media adopted the lines from (WHO director-general) Dr Tedros (Ghebreyesus) and from Xi Jinping and not the lines that were based on science that were being put forward by thoughtful, reasoned, scientific effort coming out of Dr (Robert) Redfield at CDC, secretary (Alex) Azar at HHS, the work we were doing in the State Department,” he said.

Mr Pompeo, who has been touted among leading candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, also spoke of how he was treated when he said publicly, in April 2020, that there was strong evidence the virus had leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

“It was a full-on media ­onslaught,” he recalled in The Australian’s podcast.

“They wanted to call me racist, they wanted to say this was just Pompeo, a sycophant to Donald Trump, trying to cover up for ­failures with a response to the Covid virus.

“We saw big media say you know what Donald Trump and his secretary of state are talking about this thing, these people are surely crazy, they’re political ­zealots.

“We saw all of this and you would see it flow from MSNBC to CNN. You’d see the entire panoply of large US media outlets and, of course, CNN International around the world as well saying this doesn’t make any sense, surely this was transmitted naturally.

“Saying things that were illogical and, by the way, repeating things American scientists, such as (EcoHealth Alliance president) Peter Daszak had said, who has talked about the fact that no, the gene splicing would be evident (if the virus had been manipulated).

“All these things were just probably false and scientists knew it.”

In other revelations in the interview, Mr Pompeo said it had been his recommendation to Mr Trump to withdraw from the World Health Organisation, which he describes as “part of China’s propaganda arm.”

He also speaks about the pushback from some officials in his State Department to consider the possibility the virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.

And he claims that there is “no logical pathway” for a natural ­origin of Covid-19 that does not involve the Wuhan Institute of Virology.