On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stated that “Dr. Fauci certainly would have seen the same intelligence that I saw. We would certainly have known that the risk this came from the laboratory was real.” But he “let those of us who were out there talking about it carry the mantle, and we couldn’t get science. We got politics instead.” And that by May evidence “was piling up showing that the theory of the wet market didn’t hold water and that the much more likely scenario was that this had come from the virology lab in Wuhan.”

Pompeo said, “What really matters here is, when it mattered most, when the Chinese were covering this up in early January of 2020, Dr. Fauci certainly would have seen the same intelligence that I saw. We would certainly have known that the risk this came from the laboratory was real. We would have known that the Chinese Communist Party didn’t want any of us to know that and that raised red flags throughout the entire United States government. For far too long, Dr. Fauci let those of us who were out there talking about it carry the mantle, and we couldn’t get science. We got politics instead. That’s what you saw in the left-wing media. You saw politics trumping science and that delayed our capacity to respond to what the Chinese Communist Party foisted upon the world.”

He added, “[I]n early May, I began to talk about this as well. We knew that the evidence was accumulating. It was piling up showing that the theory of the wet market didn’t hold water and that the much more likely scenario was that this had come from the virology lab in Wuhan.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett