A government investigation last year into the source of covid found essentially no evidence the virus came from nature, former State Department insider David Asher said on Thursday.
“We were seeing that even with claims of our scientists, including the NIH and Dr. Fauci’s organization, there was no evidence of a natural source for COVID-19,” he told Fox News.
The probe was done by the Arms Control and Verification Bureau inside the State Dept. and initially started at the request of Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State.
“The data piled up as we looked into it being lab-sourced or some supernatural source,” he said.
Asher was also critical of Chris Ford, the former Assistant Secretary of State who showed reservations about the investigation and warned against the lab source theory. Ford told reporters that the probe had been kept hidden from him and bypassed biological and intelligence community experts, although saying the lab source theory was “very possible.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has now become the focus of investigators researching the virus’ origins, due to its research on coronaviruses.
“That was the center of Chinese synthetic biology, and they were doing some scary stuff with gain-of-function processes,” Asher said, later stating that a natural origin was very unlikely.
“To say this was zoonotic, it’s ridiculous,” he said.
President Biden ordered an investigation into the virus’ source this week, and Asher showed hope it would be forthcoming about its findings.
Author: Blake Ambrose
