MI6: UK Government Was Aware of China’s Corona-Cover-up Yet Refused to Shut Down Travel

Chinese police officers wear protective masks as they patrol before the annual Spring Fest
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

The British government was made “fully aware” of what was “really happening” in China during the early stages of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, unnamed intelligence officials claim.

Anonymous sources, allegedly from within MI6 — the UK’s equivalent to the CIA — claim that intelligence officials had informed government ministers “not to believe Beijing’s claims” about the true scale of the pandemic.

“We didn’t believe these figures coming from China. The Government would have been fully aware of the true scale of the virus in China at that time,” an MI6 source is said to have told The Telegraph.

“The intelligence community would have known what was really happening in China. The idea that the UK would have taken Chinese figures at face value is frankly ridiculous. If the Chinese are lying, the role of the intelligence community is to know what the real figures might be if they are being hidden,” a former senior intelligence official added.

Despite this, the government refused to shut down travel from China or from any other country during the pandemic, with an estimated 15,000 people arriving per day through British airports. The government also continued to use the reported death toll numbers coming from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during Downing Street’s daily “global death comparison” until April.

The revelations from the unnamed MI6 sources follow an intelligence leak from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zeeland, that detailed the scale of the CCP coronavirus cover-up.

The report also detailed the possibility that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which it concluded had been working on coronaviruses in bats, with one strain being a 96 per cent genetic match to the COVID-19 virus that sparked a global pandemic.

The Chinese embassy in London refuted the claims that the virus emerged from the Wuhan lab, saying in a statement: “There is no evidence showing the virus came from a lab. Rumour-mongering, as well as slander and smear, will only damage international solidarity.”

The British conservative think-tank, the Henry Jackson Society revealed images from the institute, which purportedly displayed the “dangerous safety standards” at the Wuhan lab.  However, it is not clear what the workers in the images were doing or whether protective gear was required.

The director of the Asia Studies Centre at the think tank, Matthew Henderson said: “Given what we now know about lax biosecurity standards, it is at the very least plausible that human error at a virology lab contributed to the spread of the pandemic.”

“Since Beijing refuses independent access to these sites, their records and their research, why should we think otherwise?” Henderson questioned.

Follow Kurt on Twitter at @KurtZindulka

 

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