‘Entirely Consistent’: Sec. of State Pompeo Denies Mixed Messages From Administration About Virus’s Origin

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said statements by senior officials about the origins of the CCP virus are “entirely consistent,” rejecting allegations that there were conflicting opinions within the administration about where it came from.

“Every one of those statements is entirely consistent,” he said at a May 6 press conference. “Lay them down together, there is no separation. We are all trying to figure out the right answer. We are all trying to get the clarity. There are different levels of certainty assessed at different places. That’s highly appropriate.”

He added that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley’s recent remarks concerning the genesis of the outbreak were “entirely consistent with what I think everyone in the administration has said, including President Trump.”

Milley said on May 5 that the “weight of evidence” is that the virus is “natural and not man-made,” which was the same conclusion reached last week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

On the second issue of whether it was accidentally or intentionally released from a lab, Milley said: “We do not have conclusive evidence in any of that but the weight of evidence is that it was probably not intentional.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in a May 4 interview with National Geographic, said there was strong evidence indicating the virus was not made in a lab, and that it “evolved in nature and then jumped species.”

When asked about the possibility that the virus was leaked from a lab, Fauci replied: “But that means it was in the wild to begin with. That’s why I don’t get what they’re talking about [and] why I don’t spend a lot of time going in on this circular argument.”

Pompeo at the May 6 press conference repeatedly defended against assertions that such statements represented a discrepancy in official positions, saying that “people stare at data sets and come to different levels of confidence,” adding that “the intelligence community is still figuring out precisely where the virus began.”

“We don’t have certainty, and there is significant evidence that this came from the laboratory,” he added. “Those statements can both be true.”

Pompeo repeated calls for the Chinese regime to cooperate and be transparent about the origins of the outbreak.

“We still don’t have the samples that we need. We still don’t have the access,” he said. “They continue to be opaque, and they continue to deny access for this important information that our researchers, our epidemiologists need.”

worldwide, this is being framed as Trump wrong, it wasn’t created in a lab, even tho that isn’t what is being suggested. Fauci plays the same game.

20 Apr: The Australian: Wuhan lab leak rumour goes viral
Momentum is now growing behind a theory that a Wuhan laboratory, 300m from the wet market, was the source of the coronavirus.
By Philip Sherwell, JOSH GLANCY, UK Times; with AFP:
China’s “Bat Woman” was attending a conference with colleagues in Shanghai in late December when an urgent phone call came from her boss at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
People were falling sick from a mysterious new virus just a few miles from the institute. And Shi Zhengli, who had earned her nickname for her virus-hunting expeditions to bat caves, was summoned back to the central Chinese city to lead the laboratory’s investigations of samples taken from patients...

Shi is an acclaimed virologist who headed the team that traced the source of the lethal outbreak of SARS — another coronavirus — to horseshoe bats in southern China in 2002-03. She was a joint author of a research paper that warned last year that it was “highly likely” future coronavirus outbreaks would originate from bats, and an “increased probability” this would occur in China...
But Shi was surprised that the cases had emerged so far from the bats’ usual habitat in China’s subtropical south. In comments published by Scientific American magazine, she recalled a nagging fear: “Could they have come from our lab?”

Shi, who developed one of the world’s largest databases of bat-related viruses, frantically pored over the records at the institute. She was checking for any mishandling of experimental materials from bat virus research, especially during disposal, Scientific American reported in an article about her work last month. And she breathed a “sigh of relief” when the results showed the sequencing of the new infections did not match those of the viruses her team had sampled. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”...

The possibility of a laboratory leak has also been discussed at the highest levels of the British government...
In two diplomatic cables, US officials who visited the facility and met Shi expressed concerns about safety and management weaknesses at the laboratory, according to The Washington Post. One cable warned that the research into bat coronaviruses and their potential for human transmission could cause a new SARS-like epidemic. Another piece of circumstantial evidence on the desks of Trump’s national security analysts is a paper published in February by two Chinese researchers, who said the virus “probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan”.
The authors later withdrew it, saying they did not have evidence for the theories, but the claims entered the public domain.
Evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to cover up the outbreak at the early stages, even as Shi and her colleagues were investigating its origins, has further compounded suspicions...
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/coronavirus-lab-rumour-goes-viral/news-story/da7b99b335cfa638e0a767f7ddda6253

from above - debunked on Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now”! what a laugh:

Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a US research organisation, who has worked with Shi and her institute for 15 years, is scathing about the lab accident theory. “The idea that this virus escaped from the laboratory is pure baloney,” he told the Democracy Now! TV network.
Daszak said he had collected bat samples with Chinese colleagues — “some of the best scientists in the world” — and that the Wuhan laboratory did not house the culture of bat viruses but rather their genetic sequencing. “It’s a politicisation of the origins of a pandemic and that’s really unfortunate,” he said.

DemNow’s headline:

16 Apr: Democracy Now: “Pure Baloney”: Zoologist Debunks Trump’s COVID-19 Origin Theory, Explains Animal-Human Transmission

FINE, SO HOW COME CHINA WON’T ALLOW AN INVESTIGATION?

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