The wife of a Wuhan lab researcher working on coronaviruses died of what appeared to be COVID-19 in December 2019, the leader of a State Department investigation under the Trump administration told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
It would have been an early clue that the virus could be transmitted among humans, yet Chinese authorities said that the virus was not transmissible for at least a month after they knew it was, allowing it to spread, according to David Asher, who led an investigation on COVID-19’s origins and served in the State Department under Democrat and Republican presidents.
An individual who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the time provided the information on the lab researcher’s wife dying, according to Asher.
The lab workers appear to have been more likely to have had COVID-19 than the flu, Asher said.
“How many normal people in their 30s-40s get so sick from influenza that they have to be hospitalized? Lab workers, I am told, are almost certainly getting flu shots.
“Moreover, what are the odds that several workers — who happen to be the researchers on enhancing the pathogenicity of COV RaTG13 and associated COVS all fall very sick together?” Asher noted, referring to coronaviruses.
China has blocked interviewing the previously ill researchers at the WIV, the January State Department statement said.
WIV researchers were studying viruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, but China has blocked access to records of such research being conducted at the WIV, according to the State Department’s statement in January.
A senior State Department official told The Washington Post that the Biden administration does not dispute the information in the department’s Jan. 15 statement, produced during the Trump administration, but that it did not represent a balanced representation because it was focused on the lab leak and not other possible origins of the virus.
