By the AFP Staff
Reports have been circulating that a top Chinese national security official has defected to the United States and may have brought with him information on how the virus that causes Covid-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan. This revelation follows reports that a worker at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) where risky research was being performed on bat coronaviruses has disappeared after she came down with symptoms consistent with Covid-19 in the fall of 2019.
On June 22, news and commentary website “The Daily Beast” detailed recent allegations that Dong Jingwei, the No. 2 official in the Chinese Ministry of State Security, and his daughter fled Hong Kong for the United States last February. According to the reports, China moved quickly to scrub any record of the Chinese intelligence officer, not just from official Communist Party websites but even from the Chinese-government-run search engine Baidu. Prior to that, Dong had regularly been featured in Chinese propaganda reports and was often pictured meeting with foreign diplomats in official accounts.
Dr. Han Lianchao, a former Chinese foreign minister who defected to the U.S. after the violence at Tiananmen Square in 1989, told “The Daily Beast” that, in June, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Communist Party Foreign Affairs Director Yang Jiechi demanded that the U.S. government return Dong, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken refused, leading to China threatening that there would be repercussions if he was not turned over to the communists.
Australia’s “News.com.au” went even further in a recent report, charging that Dong’s evidence likely prompted President Joe Biden to order a new probe into the origins of Covid after Biden personally spiked a previous investigation. In May, Biden publicly called on U.S. intelligence to “redouble” its investigation to find out whether Covid jumped from an animal host to humans or if it leaked from the lab in Wuhan.
This incredible story comes just after multiple credible reports documented how a former WIV employee, who many people consider to be Covid-19 “Patient Zero,” has completely disappeared from public life in China, leading them to believe she is either being held by the Chinese government or she is dead.
In late May, “National Review” reported in-depth on the story of a WIV researcher named Huang Yanling. The conservative magazine cited a UK interview with Mike Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, who told reporters that the Chinese Communist Party had prevented investigators from interviewing researchers from the WIV, “including those who were ill in the fall of 2019.” Huang was among those researchers, who is believed to have fallen ill while working at the lab and had to be hospitalized. Since that time, Huang has disappeared, and even her work history has been scrubbed from WIV’s website. A curt, cryptic post made to Chinese social media purportedly from Huang surfaced a short time later, which, when translated, read, “To my teachers and fellow students, how long no speak. I am Huang Yanling, still alive. If you receive any email (regarding the Covid-19 rumor), please say it’s not true.”
Earlier this year, The New Zealand Herald summed up the growing concern over the situation.
Huang is “one of scores of doctors, scientists, activists, and journalists who disappeared during the Chinese Communist Party’s suspected cover-up,” reported the Herald.
Unless the Biden administration releases what it knows about the origins of Covid-19 and puts heavy pressure on China, the Chinese Communist Party may well sweep under the rug the provenance of a virus that has killed over 3 million people, forced entire countries to shut down their economies, and cost millions of people their livelihoods.
