What Really Happened In Wuhan, page 13
The question remained: When was it time to tell the American public and the world about China’s activities at the Wuhan laboratories?
MARCH 2020, WASHINGTON DC
Within weeks the virus had begun its march around the globe, and the first devastating outbreak was in Italy. When Bob Redfield was told of the prevalence of asymptomatic transmission in Italy Mulvaney recalls the words spilled out of his mouth: “Oh shit.”
Redfield relayed the news to Mulvaney and other White House officials that his international counterparts had called to confirm the grim news. Asymptomatic transmission was something China had been denying.
It’s fair to say that when the virus crippled Italy, senior officials in the Trump administration were shell-shocked. Their entire containment strategy to protect the United States was built on the premise the virus was not transmissible if someone was asymptomatic. That incorrect working assumption alone, based on medical advice from health officials, would cost the United States hundreds of thousands of lives.
“It meant that everything we’d done on containment is pretty much useless,” Mulvaney says. “It meant people with the disease could walk right through the airports and out into the greater population, which we expect is probably what happened.”
On March 1, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Chris Liddell, threw a small dinner party at his home in Washington DC. It was a Sunday evening and still chilly in the nation’s capital. Gathered around the elegant dinner table were the upper echelons of the Trump administration: Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and his wife, Pamela West, and National Economic Council Chair director Larry Kudlow and his wife, Judith.
Liddell, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff – one of the few to remain in the job until the end of the Trump Presidency – had led an illustrious business career before joining the administration. He was the Chief Financial Officer for Microsoft, a Vice Chairman at General Motors, the Chairman of Xero Corporation and CEO of Carter Holt Harvey in his former Wall Street career. He then took charge of Trump’s strategic initiatives at the White House before being promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff. Unquestionably, Liddell, originally from New Zealand, is a smart guy.
To get the conversation rolling as they ate, Liddell posed a question to his guests, for each to answer around the table. “What is the big issue of 2020?” he asked. And one by one, the guests ticked off various topics. The soaring economy, Liddell himself nominated. The election that Trump was going to romp home, said Mulvaney. And so it went, around the table. Extraordinarily, not one of the six Americans nominated Covid-19 as the defining issue of 2020. None of them.
The four Australians present – one of them, a doctor – were astounded. They all said the coronavirus would be the defining issue of the year. Australian Ambassador Joe Hockey suggested to the group that perhaps it would be a good idea to tell the American public to wear masks. “Maybe everyone should be wearing masks, because you remember SARS in Asia, that’s how they managed it. With masks,” he said to the men who had become his friends since he moved to Washington four years earlier. But he was shouted down, told that masks were “useless”. “You’d never get Americans to wear masks,” Mulvaney said.
Hockey, who remains close friends with Mulvaney and Liddell, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. They all thought it would pass, it was like a bad flu season. “None of them had ever managed a crisis because none of them had ever been in government before – at least not a crisis they didn’t manufacture themselves,” he said. “They were in denial, total denial. They thought it would be like Singapore, come the summer, it’ll pass. They were saying, ‘We’ve got it under control. It’s a mild flu.’ They had all the excuses. I don’t blame them. They were receiving confusing advice and they were following confusing leadership. They could see it potentially undermining Trump’s re-election strategy.”
Trump made the comparison with the flu himself days later on March 9. In a tweet he said, “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” The next day he said, “And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
Puzzled, Hockey wondered whether the same intelligence that was warning Australia about the impending gravity of the situation was reaching the President and his most senior advisors. The Americans were so relaxed about the situation, Hockey questioned if maybe Australia was heading into lockdown unnecessarily. “At times I thought Australia was overreacting because I was in an environment where everyone was saying ‘Don’t overreact’,” he recalls. “Washington is the centre of the universe and if something is happening on the other side of the world, it doesn’t seem real.”
Australia’s Defence Minister Peter Dutton, who at the time was Minister for Home Affairs, says that in the United States “there was a belief that this wasn’t going to hit their shores at that point in time. Australia had seen the intelligence. The predictions for us at that point were fairly dire. The initial advice to us was quite confronting, that we were going to run out of capacity within ICUs [intensive care units]. Fortunately, that didn’t transpire.”
The White House’s dismissive approach to the coronavirus also alarmed Fox News’s top-rating host, Tucker Carlson. He made his first ever trip to Mar-a-Lago on March 7, 2020 to warn the President the situation could get really serious. He was particularly concerned the US may not have the medical capacity to deal with a pandemic.
Carlson had intended to keep his trip a secret, and even asked the Secret Service to help him sneak in undetected, but unbeknown to him, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle was holding her birthday party there. He was spotted instantly and news of his mission quickly leaked.
Carlson told Trump “this could be really bad” and expressed his view the United States had “missed the point where we can control it”.
“My concern was that we may not have the capacity to take all these patients and that we may not have the drugs to treat them,” Carlson said in an interview with Vanity Fair 10 days later.
“I think Trump has a really finely calibrated sense of danger and I think it served him well. I think a lot of the people around him, and I mean broadly around him – particularly Republican members on Capitol Hill, in leadership too – were determined to pretend this wasn’t happening. I kept reading pieces about how easy it was to transmit the virus and I just became obsessed with reading about it, and there was actually a lot of publicly available information, a lot of it speculative, but it was informed speculation in my view. And it led me to think that this could be a massive problem in the United States.”
Carlson said he felt embarrassed about giving advice to the President of the United States, but trying to ensure the Trump Administration took Covid-19 more seriously drove him to make the visit.
“I’m just a talk show host. But I felt – and my wife strongly felt – that I had a moral obligation to try and be helpful in whatever way possible,” he told Vanity Fair.
Mulvaney concedes that he didn’t understand the coronavirus would emerge as the primary problem of 2020 back in early March. “The mood in February, March was that the president would win between 40 and 42 states.” Mulvaney told me. “We were extraordinarily confident of re-election in February and March of 2020. If you had asked me in February what the defining event of 2020 would end up being I would have said the election.”
Pottinger was wearing a mask in the White House by March, He even moved out of the West Wing and into the Eisenhower executive office building, west of the White House, he was so concerned. But Fauci still insisted it wasn’t necessary. Not only that, he actively said masks would make the public health situation worse.
Azar and HHS Assistant Secretary Robert Kadlec worked with Hanes – a company that manufactures clothing for Bonds and other brands – to develop enough cloth masks for every American. They proposed sending a pack of five masks to every postal service mailing address in the entire United States, pitching the idea to the Pence-led Coronavirus Task Force in the third week of March. But it was shut down by Pence and his team.
“They thought it was an overreaction and thought it would create hysteria sending it to everyone in the country,” one insider says. “They didn’t like the look of them and said they looked like training bras.”
Fauci’s strong advice against masks suited Trump. Trump’s closest aides reveal there was a big reason the President resisted the growing calls in the media to wear a mask. “This will have to absolutely be on background,” confides one senior Trump official conspiratorially, preparing to divulge what sounded like it would be a state secret. “The President was against the mask for visual purposes. He thought he looked bad in them. He did not like the masks. It had nothing to do with science, nothing to do with health and everything to do with the fact it didn’t fit his brand. It didn’t look right. That’s why he fought it for as long as he did.”
Another senior official confirms this. “The President did not like mask-wearing. He thought he looked weak wearing a mask. He physically said that, ‘Masks make you look weak.’”
The official claims Trump also insisted military leaders, in particular, not wear masks because it made them look weak, along with health officials. “Before we would go on stage he would say, ‘Take those damn things off’ or ‘If you are going to wear that, don’t stand at the podium with me.’”
Later, in September, Azar briefed the President on a Japanese study that showed when two people wear a surgical mask at one metre distance it cuts down viral spread by 72 per cent. “We need to wear masks, they work,” Azar said.
“That’s your call, that’s good for you,” Trump allegedly replied. Pictures from the Republican National Convention in August on the South Lawn show Azar is a lone figure in the front row wearing a mask. It was a deeply uncomfortable moment for him, and senior figures expressed their displeasure in no uncertain terms.
Finally, on March 11, the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic, and Trump declared a national emergency two days later after coming to the realisation the US was going to be impacted in a major way. But still there seemed to be a denial about the extent to which the United States would be hit. On March 12, Trump said, “It’s going to go away. The United States, because of what I did and what the administration did with China, we have 32 deaths at this point . . . when you look at the kind of numbers that you’re seeing coming out of other countries, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it.”
Five days later, on March 16, Trump finally seemed to wake up to the reality of China’s cover-up. He changed his tune and referred to the “China virus”. O’Brien says the reason for the shift was twofold. Firstly, it became clear that China was never going to cooperate; and secondly, not only were they not helping but they were using the virus to their strategic advantage.
“The cover up was gaining steam and not losing steam,” he says. “The idea that maybe the local and regional officials were covering things up from Xi, and he didn’t know any better, and once he got to the bottom of it, China would open up . . . We realised this cover-up was going all the way to the top. There would be no cooperation. Then there was the fact that the Chinese Communist Party weaponised Covid and tried to use it to gain an advantage over the US and its allies by trading masks and PPE, and eventually vaccines, for access for Huawei to countries that were otherwise concerned about turning over their 5G backbone to the Chinese. It became pretty aggressive; the whole wolf-warrior diplomacy effort of the Chinese started taking real shape.”
The attitude shifted significantly inside the White House, O’Brien recalls. “At that point, folks in our government started to realise there’s not going to be any goodwill or cooperation from Beijing. The Chinese are going to use this virus that they allowed to spread around the world to increase their power and dominion.”
The other reason for the change in language was that the spreading coronavirus in the United States was fast becoming a major political problem for Trump. Shifting the blame back onto China was a political decision.
The economic hard-heads, like Kudlow and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, were reluctantly coming to terms with the fact their treasured trade deal with China had effectively been rendered meaningless. “It became a management issue very quickly. Trump had to create an enemy, that’s why he called it the China virus. He didn’t want to have a fight with Xi Jinping, he likes a strong man, he likes winners, that’s Trump’s headspace,” Hockey says. “Pompeo was the one driving China, China, China. And Pompeo, don’t forget, was the director of the CIA. He sees it all, so he’s a crucial guy. And then Trump realised that he couldn’t dismiss it.”
By April, Pompeo finally had the preliminary results of Miles Yu’s investigation, which involved multiple agencies. Yu had dedicated a significant amount of time canvassing a large quantity of Chinese publications, digging into the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the other virology laboratories in Wuhan, and the research they were conducting. The result was a report called “The PRC’s Biosafety Negligence and Circumstantial Evidence Against the Wuhan Institute of Virology”.
Carrying a two-inch-thick binder, Yu walked to Pompeo’s office, near his own on the highly secure seventh floor of the State Department. The report within was concise, but the documentation supporting it was hundreds and hundreds of pages. He placed it on Pompeo’s desk and the Secretary immediately started to read through it, commenting, “This is incredible.”
The dossier begins, “China is a country obsessed with dangerous viruses. State-run media outlets often tout China’s great discoveries of a phenomenal number of new viruses heretofore unknown to mankind. Over the past 12 years, China’s army of virologists have discovered close to 2000 new viruses while over the past 200 years, the rest of the world has only discovered 2284. In its rush to greatness and dominance in virus studies, China often neglects biosafety, with catastrophic consequences.”
Yu’s report, dated April 26, 2020, which I obtained during my investigation for this book, states it is most likely the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory. “The labs in Wuhan and the chain of physical contact related to the capture and study of coronaviruses in bats are the most likely vectors of original infection for the Covid-19 virus, and any credible investigation into the origin must start there,” it states. “Only after this likely source has been completely ruled out should we move our investigation on to other potential sources.”
His report states, “There is no direct, smoking gun evidence to prove that a leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology caused the pandemic, but there is persuasive circumstantial evidence to link China’s pervasive biosafety negligence to such a possible leak from WIV.” He adds that his evidence is “descriptive” and is “not meant to promote the lab leak theory”.
His report goes on to detail Xi Jinping’s own comments around biosafety concerns, along with how the French government, US officials and the international community were worried about safety problems at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Yu’s report also raised the bombshell possibility that China may have invented a Covid-19 vaccine prior to the outbreak. “It may seem likely that WIV has been researching a vaccine before the outbreak,” he wrote. He explained the unusual case of Remdesivir. In mid-January 2020, Fauci donated free Remdesivir samples to China for an experimental clinical trial to save Chinese lives, to see if it was effective against Covid-19. Remdesivir was an American invention, developed by scientists at USAMRIID in conjunction with the American pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences, using taxpayer funds. After Fauci donated the samples, the Wuhan Institute of Virology compiled a commercial patent for the treatment on January 19 in a case of intellectual property theft.
Yu wrote of this, “Yet days later, on January 19th, even before the Chinese government admitted the virus could be transmitted from human to human and before Beijing locked down Wuhan, WIV finished compiling a ‘user patent’ application for Gilead’s Remdesivir and filed it on January 21st to Chinese patent authorities in Beijing.”
Yu wrote that this “may give credence to the following possibility: prior to the surprise outbreak in its close vicinity, WIV had possessed the novel coronavirus in its lab and had known of its lethality and pathogenicity for a while. It had been actively researching a vaccine before anyone else could succeed, thus giving China the sole patent right.”
He went on to say, “It raises the possibility that WIV has been researching a Covid-19 (treatment) of its own all along, and would like to prevent Gilead’s Remdesivir from entering the Chinese market. Filing a patent requires lengthy documentation, clinical statistics, and international and national legal opinions. It normally would take months or even years to prepare and compile the application, rather than a few days.”
The dossier also detailed China’s bioweapons research, claims from scientists Covid-19 had been genetically engineered and presented evidence of Shi Zhengli’s own work genetically manipulating viruses, including warnings from a paper she co-authored nine months before the pandemic that there would be a future SARS- or MERS-like outbreak originating in China.
He also claimed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s own laboratory level-4 director Yuan Zhiming “harbored doubts about biosafety at WIV and other high BSL labs in China before WIV was accredited in 2017 and went operational in 2018”.
Reflecting back on his dossier, Yu says, “The most important thing about that paper I wrote was not necessarily the conclusions or the suggestions or the loopholes I found. It is really the original sources. I documented every single thing.
