A FORMER State Department official who took part in the Wuhan lab probe into the origins of coronavirus said the investigation found almost no evidence that the virus came from a "natural" source.
David Asher, a former lead investigator of the task force created by the Trump administration, said it was "sort of ridiculous" to believe the deadly disease passed naturally from animals to humans.
"We were finding that despite the claims of our scientific community, including the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Fauci's NIAID organization, there was almost no evidence that supported a natural, zoonotic evolution or source of COVID-19," he told Fox News.
"The data disproportionately stacked up, as we investigated, that it was coming out of a lab or some supernatural source."
Asher was drafted into the inquiry from his role at the State Department's arms control and verification bureau by his former boss Mike Pompeo, who ordered an inquiry into the source of Covid.
Pompeo was particularly concerned whether the virus had been created as part of China's biological warfare effort – despite US public health officials brushing off suggestions Covid was ravaging the world by design.
The probe was aborted by President Joe Biden's administration after he took office earlier this year, amid concerns over the reliability of the findings.
It was met by internal resistance as some were wary the investigation was a political ploy by Trump to pin the blame on the Chinese, CNN reported.
GOP lawmakers have since suggested Dr Anthony Fucci should be fired for originally dismissing the idea it could have been leak, with Rep Warren Davidson accusing him of favouring "political science" over "the science on Covid-19."
Fucci has now said he is "not convinced" Covid developed naturally.
"I had biostatisticians at one of our national labs calculate the odds of this evolving in nature,” Asher explained. "And it was like 1 in 13 million, and then they revised it to about 1 in 13 billion. So, to say this came out of a zoonotic situation is sort of ridiculous."
Biden has now done a U-turn and revealed he has ordered intelligence agencies to explore the possibility Covid was leaked from a lab and report back to him in 90 days.
"I think they’ll find a lot," Asher said of the investigation. "Whether they say much is a different matter."
"THEY WERE UP TO SOME VERY HAIRY STUFF"
WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also ordered a new probe just as the WHO-China joint investigation team released a long-awaited and much-derided report which ruled out the possibility as "extremely unlikely".
But Asher claims that the Wuhan Institute of Virology acted as "the epicenter of synthetic biology in the People’s Republic of China and they were up to some very hairy stuff with synthetic biology and so-called gain of function techniques."
It comes after Dr Fucci confessed he couldn't be certain whether Chinese scientists at the Wuhan lab kept their word and avoided using US funding to conduct alteration experiments that may have led to the Covid-19 outbreak.
He said "there’s no way of guaranteeing" what the $600,000 given to the lab was used for, but insisted the US gifted it for a collaborative study with "respectable" scientists on how coronaviruses are transmitted to humans.
A Wall Street Journal report alleged three Wuhan staffers were hospitalized in November 2019 before the Covid outbreak was disclosed to the world.
One researcher at the lab has since claimed that fangs went through his rubber gloves "like a needle" while collecting samples in a cave packed with infected bats.
A video – which first emerged two years ago – appears to show scientists working on "live viruses" without gloves and masks in an apparent breach of World Health Organisation safety rules.
The scientist dubbed "patient zero", who vanished from the Wuhan lab at the start of the Covid outbreak, is still missing despite a year-long search.
Virus expert Huang Yanling was named online in China during the very first worrying reports of the deadly pandemic back in February last year.
The claims created a link between the pandemic and the lab – which houses zoonotic bat diseases – and sparked fears the virus was accidentally leaked during experiments.
China has long been accused of attempting to cover up or distort its role in the story of Covid.
Former President Trump has welcomed the news, remaining confident his theory about Wuhan was correct.
"I think it was obvious to smart people. That's where it came from. I have no doubt about it. I had no doubt about it. I was criticized by the press," he said.
"I said right at the beginning it came out of Wuhan. And that's where all the deaths were also, by the way, when we first heard about this, there were body bags, dead people laying all over Wuhan province, and that's where it happened to be located.
'To me it was very obvious. I said it very strongly and I was criticized and now people are agreeing with me, so that's okay."
He wants China to be punished for their lack of transparency and urged his successor Biden to take a tough stance, saying: "We have to be stronger than what we are right now."
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