Revealed: US failed to act on Covid-19 intelligence, says Wei Jingsheng

US agencies were told in late 2019, months before China admitted the existence of Covid-19, a virus was out of control in Wuhan.

 

China’s most famous defector to America warned US intelligence agencies a coronavirus was spreading in Wuhan in November 2019 — six weeks before China admitted there was an outbreak.

Wei Jingsheng, the father of China’s democracy movement, reveals in the new book What Really Happened in Wuhan that he first heard of a new, mysterious virus at the time of the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019.

Highly alarmed, the former Chinese Communist Party insider, whose defection in 1997 made global news, alerted intelligence agencies, a US politician with links to the President and Chinese human rights activist Dimon Liu.

Asked if he had any sense the intelligence agencies were taking seriously his intelligence about a new virus in Wuhan, Mr Wei, 70, said: “I felt they were not as heavily concerned as I was so I tried my best to provide more detailed information,” he said. “They may not believe there is (a) government of a country that would do something like that (cover up a virus). So I kept repeating myself in an effort to try to persuade them.”

Mr Wei said he was “very worried because ... whichever way the Communist regime released this virus, I felt that the West is not prepared”.

It was not until December 31 that China involuntarily alerted the World Health Organisation there was an outbreak in Wuhan. Beijing denied Covid-19 was contagious until January 20, 2020, when it admitted there was evidence of human-to-human transmission.

Dimon Liu and Wei Jingsheng in Monday’s Sky News documentary ‘What Really Happened In Wuhan’, based on Sharri Markson’s book of the same name.

Mr Wei, who spent 18 years in Chinese prisons for objecting to the Communist regime, is highly respected on both sides of politics and has forged relationships with former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi.

In a Sky News documentary, based on the book, to air on Monday night, Mr Wei said he found out about the virus from high-level contacts in Beijing.

“I talked to Dimon and some other American politicians in the House of the danger of this situation,” he said. “There were officials from the White House at that time as well. In November 2019.”

Mr Wei would not reveal which politician he told. “I’m not sure if this politician wants me to talk about him right here,” he said. “But I want to say he is a high enough politician, high enough to be able to reach to the President of the United States.”

David Asher, the State Department official who spearheaded a taskforce into the origins of Covid-19, said the opportunity presented by Mr Wei’s warning was like “stopping 9/11 before it happened”.

Mr Asher said the US government had other crucial pieces of early-warning evidence in late 2019 but it failed to connect the dots. He said the US government first had intelligence about Wuhan Institute of Virology workers falling sick with Covid-like symptoms in late 2019 – a year before he discovered it during his investigation into the origins of the virus for the State Department. By then, 1.7 million people worldwide had died from Covid-19.

In the Sky News documentary, Mr Asher said he was shocked when he found out “we actually could have had foreknowledge” of the coronavirus. “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 said.

“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.”

 

Chinese authorities were acting to suppress news of the Wuhan outbreak, purging the internet of social media posts and news stories and “disappearing” dissidents and whistleblowers who attempted to sound a warning. Social media reports about a new coronavirus did not emerge until late December 2019 and it was not until the end of January 2020 that the US, Australia and New Zealand closed borders to travellers from China.

Ms Liu reveals in What Really Happened in Wuhan that Mr Wei told her about the virus on November 22, 2019 at a dinner where her husband, former CIA agent Robert Suettinger was also present. “I couldn’t quite believe what he was saying,” Ms Liu said. “At that time, I had thought that the coronavirus could not be worse than SARS. And SARS, as we knew from experience, was not that contagious and it could be contained. I thought at the time that was the case. Okay, there was an outbreak, but the authorities and the advance of medical sciences would be able to contain the spread of it.”

In the book, Ms Liu details the race to get information about the new virus to the White House and her uncertainty about it. After Mr Wei’s visit, she wrote a memo of what he had divulged to her and Mr Suettinger. She intended to pass it on to Donald Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Matt Pottinger.

“But I didn’t send it to him because so many things were so incredulous,” she said. “I wrote it, but I didn’t send it because I decided it was better that Wei talks directly to Matt Pottinger.”

Mr Wei says in the book: “In the past several decades, the CCP’s capacity to seal information is hard to be understood by you Westerners.”

Order your copy of What Really Happened in Wuhan by Sharri Markson here