Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says there is evidence that the Coronavirus outbreak came from a lab in Wuhan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Via Wikipedia. 

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo leveled criticism towards the government of China and said there is evidence that the Coronavirus outbreak came from a lab in Wuhan. AP. Pompeo said that China had covered up the severity of the disease while at the same time slashing exports of medical supplies and increasing imports. China did not inform the extent of the outbreak to the WHO for much of January. Pompeo said there was no evidence that the virus was deliberately spread but did mention that diseases, like the original SARS, came from China and they have a major history of having lab accidents. 

My Comment:

Of the two claims here I think the one about China covering up the virus is pretty solidly proven. China was slow on informing the world about the virus and even though it was likely known about by the government in December, they did not reveal the extent of the problem until late January, after it was already in the United States and across the world. There were also making claims that the virus couldn't be transmitted from person to person long after they should have known better. 

China even went so far as to silence whistle-blowers, like Li Wenliang, who warned people about the virus. Though China reversed course on Wenliang, the fact remains that they silenced him before the honored him after his death from the virus. And he is far from the only one, many of the people who were warning the world about the virus ended up disappearing.

However, I do want to point out that much of the problem seemed to be with the local authorities. They were not only lying to the world, they lied to the Chinese government as well. That doesn't absolve the Chinese government of a thing though as their control is higher than our government's control over the various state governments. But it does explain why China was slow at handling the outbreak. 

Pompeo's second claim is that the virus likely originated from a lab. Though that hasn't been confirmed I do think that there is a very strong circumstantial case for it. Indeed, there is a crowdsourced study that detailed all the evidence, but I found it once and didn't bookmark it. Modern search engines are less than useless as they only return results from news sources and won't actually help you find what you are looking for. I'm going to repeat some of the findings from that study but keep in mind I'm doing this from memory and it may not be 100% accurate. 

The report pointed out some things that should be obvious when you think about it. The bats that act as natural reservoir for Coronaviruses like SARS and SARS CoV-2 don't live in the Wuhan region, aren't active in winter and have never been sold in the Huanan Seafood wet market. There was also evidence collected that the Wuhan labs were working with Coronaviruses and bats and that there had been many accidents at lab sites across the world where viruses escaped. 

Indeed, viral escapes are nothing new. It is believed that the 1977-78 outbreak of H1N1, the virus that caused the Spanish Flu, was due to a lab leak in either Russia or China. The last death from Smallpox was due to a lab accident in the UK. The original SARS escaped from the lab six times, four of those times happened in China alone! 

I think the idea that this was a natural event is unlikely, though not impossible. For it to have happened, an infected bat would have to fly hundreds of miles from its home and infect an animal that then came into contact with a human being. Either that or a human had to have gotten infected in the region where these bats live, contracted the virus but not spread it to anyone until they entered Wuhan. Neither of those scenarios are totally inconceivable but neither are likely either

With China being so secretive about the early days of this virus and not allowing international organizations to visit the labs in Wuhan it's probably going to be impossible to prove for a fact that the virus was an accidental lab release. But I do think it's more likely than a natural outbreak. That isn't to say that the Coronavirus is a bioweapon, that theory has been fairly conclusively debunked. But I also think that the virus was likely being studied in a Wuhan lab and an accident occurred. Or, even worse, a corrupt lab worker stole and sold an infected animal for consumption. 

If we had a functioning media I think the evidence for the outbreak being from a lab would be a lot more accessible. But the media is going to bat for China and is also opposing the theory simply because President Trump mentioned it as a possibility. Until the US government releases a report they will call the idea a "conspiracy theory" even though I think it's the more likely possibility. 

Regardless of the origins of the virus I do think that China deserves the lion's share of the blame for the virus. Even if the original "wet market" theory is correct they still deserve the blame for the absolutely atrocious sanitary conditions in those markets. And I think it's pretty conclusively proven that China knew a lot more about the virus than they let on and didn't give the world enough warning about what was going to happen. Indeed, if China's reaction had been to shut down travel as soon as they discovered the virus it's possible that it might have never left China in the first place...