The most likely explanation for the origin of the coronavirus outbreak relates to a biological weapons laboratory in Wuhan, China, said Steven Mosher, expert on China and author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order.
Mosher shared his estimation on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, drawing on his Saturday-published New York Post column, titled “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab.”
“The evidence has been piling up for weeks, now,” said Mosher. “I’ve been watching this very closely. I knew back in January when the first reports came out of China that they’d been hiding it for weeks. I know that they’ve had a bioweapons program in place in China for decades. I know that they have only one level 4 laboratory in China, in the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic, a city with … probably 15 million people.”
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Mosher continued, “But then we have new evidence. At an emergency meeting in Beijing held on the 14th of this month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping — I might call him dictator Xi, except Michael Bloomberg would object, but he is the dictator — he held a meeting and he spoke about the need to set up a system to prevent epidemics in the future by increasing lab safety. He said laboratory safety is a national security issue.”
Mosher went on, “Now, if that isn’t clear enough, the next day, the very next day, [the] Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive, and its title, it’s a little bit long, but pay attention to this, is ‘instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.’ Wait a minute, wait a minute, ‘instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in labs that handle viruses like the novel coronavirus’ — the one virus causing the epidemic — and you mean to suggest, China, that maybe your lab’s biosecurity management wasn’t very good and that this virus actually escaped from the lab in Wuhan, and now you’re playing catch up after the cat is out of the bag, after the genie is out of the bottle, after the horse has left the barn?”
“That’s what it certainly sounds like to me,” assessed Mosher. “It sounds like they have a real problem keeping dangerous pathogens and test tubes where they belong and I’ll tell you this: we know that there have been many, many leaks from China’s biotechnology labs in the past their bioresearch labs are leaky.”
Mosher remarked, “In fact, in Beijing a few years ago, they leaked the SARS virus — that deadly SARS virus. SARS is sudden acute respiratory syndrome. [SARS] killed ten percent of the people that it was communicated to — at least twice out of a lab in Beijing a few years ago. We know they have a problem with containment of these dangerous pathogens.”
Mosher stated, “We know they’re working on them, tinkering with them, doing genetic engineering on them. In fact, this Ministry of Science and Technology now wants to strengthen biosecurity management, [and] has been funding research on coronaviruses for the last ten years. They’ve been taking out segments of the coronavirus RNA and replacing it with other segments from HIV and other things. That’s in open source virology research publications.”
Chinese researchers may have sold infected laboratory animals used in virology research at a meat market, noted Mosher.
“So connect the dots, put everything together,” urged Mosher. “They were doing research on dangerous coronaviruses in the lab, and it got out of the lab. How did it get out of the lab? Well, this is interesting, too, because you might think that the most likely scenario is a researcher in the lab was careless and got some of the virus on his clothing or actually got infected with the disease then went out into public and infected the public, but there’s another vector. And the other vector is this: that sometimes in China researchers who are buying expensive lab animals, after they get done researching the lab animals, maybe infecting them with coronavirus, they then, if the lab animals are still alive, they then take them to make a little extra money and sell them at the local fresh meat market where they are slaughtered and wind up in someone’s stomach.”
Mosher added, “Now that’s hard to believe, but it does happen. There are researchers in prison in China today who have done that and who have been caught. The fact is Chinese Communist Party officials try to monetize anything they’re in control of, and if you give a Chinese party official a bunch of free lab animals, he’s going to use them for his research and then, in some cases, instead of cremating them like they’re supposed to, they then turn around and sell them on the meat market.”
“There was a meeting in Beijing by the head of the National Health Service of China a few weeks ago, and he instructed [health workers] in all the provinces, cities, and towns of China that the first priority was politics, the second priority was safety, and the third priority was curing the sick,” recalled Mosher.
China’s quarantine measures are “more like the guillotine,” determined Mosher. “It’s more like just amputation, amputating these people out of society, so they won’t infect others.”
Mosher praised the Trump administration’s policies towards addressing the coronavirus threat.
“We took action faster than almost any country,” he said, highlighting President Donald Trump’s decision to ban foreigners who had recently traveled to China from entering the U.S. He added, “President Trump set up a task force with the leading epidemiologists, the leading virologists, [and] the leading figures in the field and he’s giving them all the resources that they need.”
Mosher concluded, “If there’s an administration that is capable of handling this kind of crisis, it’s the Trump administration.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter.
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