Trump to Sky News: Fauci failed to brief him on Wuhan

FPI / September 22, 2021

In a new documentary, President Donald Trump said his top medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci did not reveal what he knew about research conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

In the Sky News Australia documentary "What Really Happened in Wuhan", Sharri Markson also reported that she uncovered evidence that a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology first occurred in September 2019.

Trump, in an interview told Sky News's Markson that Fauci did not reveal that research on coronaviruses was being conducted in a Wuhan, China lab which was funded by his agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Markson asked Trump: “Did he (Fauci) ever once mention to you that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was genetically manipulating coronaviruses?”

Trump responded: “Well no he didn’t and you know Anthony has been in government for many, many years. He’s a bureaucratic kind of guy, a very great promoter. I give him an A+ as a promoter and probably a C or a D as a doctor.”

Markson reported in the documentary that, on Sept. 12, 2019, the virus database at the Wuhan lab was taken offline, "and with it 22,000 coronavirus samples were gone. That same day security was beefed up at the facility and a tender was issued to replace the air-conditioning system. There was later a communications blackout, with no cell-phone or signals activity."

The lab "also went on a spending spree, purchasing an air medical waste incinerator and PCR equipment to test for coronaviruses," Markson noted.

Related: Fauci blindsided Trump on 60 Wuhan projects with China’s PLA; ‘Worth the risk’ of pandemic, September 19, 2021

Markson also spotlighted what has been a widely unreported aspect of how the virus may have been spread to the world, the so-called Military Games that were held in Wuhan.

A month after evidence emerged that the virus leaked from the Wuan lab, the city of Wuhan hosted the Military Games, with more than 9,000 athletes from around the world in attendance.

The opening ceremony was held on Oct. 18, 2019. Two weeks later, athletes begun returning home to more than 100 countries.

Miles Yu, Trump's former principal China adviser and a former contributing editor of Geostrategy-Direct, said athletes who returned from the Military Games had symptoms now known as coronavirus symptoms but were never tested.

"All I know is that people got sick," Yu said, adding that he believed athletes from France, Germany, and the U.S. became sick.

"But getting sick in Wuhan in that particular timeframe of the kind of symptoms that are very similar to what would later known to be coronavirus symptoms, that obviously deserves investigation," Yu said.

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Wei Jinsheng, China's most famous defector to the United States, said he "learned there was an unusual exercise by the Chinese government during the Military Games. I thought that the Chinese government would take this opportunity to spread the virus during the Military Games as many foreigners would show up there."

Markson reported that Wei had made his concerns known to close friend Dimon Lui at a dinner in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 22, 2019.

"He did say it was a coronavirus," Lui said, according to the documentary.

Trump said he is 95 percent certain the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab.

"I don't know if they had bad thoughts or whether it was gross incompetence but one way or the other it came out of Wuhan, and it came from the Wuhan lab," Trump said. "Some of the intelligence is classified and I can't talk about it but it most likely, and when I say most likely, like 95 percent, came from the Wuhan lab."

Trump said he had "started hearing stories… that there were lots of body bags outside of the lab and people were saying, 'there are a lot of people lying down on the streets of Wuhan.' "

Markson also asked Trump about whether he believed a scientist from the Wuhan lab was "patient zero."

"A scientist walked out and had lunch outside in a park or something with the girlfriend and he had it and she had it," Trump said. "I don't know if it was patient zero or patient something else but that's one theory."

Trump also blasted the World Health Organization (WHO) and its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

"The WHO is owned and controlled by China. I dropped out of the World Health Organization," Trump said.



Trump administration Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Markson: "Listen the people that had the most access to the most intelligence, are telling you that the most likely origin of Covid-19, of the Wuhan virus was what happened... was a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."

Ratcliffe added: "This is really most likely what happened and it's more than just a possibility, it's certainly a probability and it's probably a certainty."

Intelligence was received that three people working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen sick in October 2019, two months before the first official case was reported, Markson noted in the documentary.

"What (former Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo and I put out is people became sick at the lab in October and with symptoms that became entirely consistent with what most people have experienced around the world from Covid-19," Ratcliffe said.

"I didn't even know about the Military Games until someone from the army called me in December of 2020 and asked me if I could explain what happened at the Wuhan Military Games, and whether these people had fallen sick with an early strain, emerging strain of Covid," David Asher, former Covid-19 investigator at the U.S. State Department, told Markson.

In the weeks and months after the games were held, reports emerged of athletes becoming sick. Asher said data from the National Institutes of Health indicated Covid-19 was circulating in the United States as early as December.

"Some of these people who came back from these games were sick with something," Asher said.

"My concern was that the Chinese were doing research in, as we learned later, quite uncontrolled circumstances that was most definitely related to biological warfare ambitions in the future," Asher said. "And that they had had an accident of a secretive program that they never wanted anyone to know about because it was a weapon and the weapon had gotten released errantly. It was like someone dropping a nuclear weapon out the back of a B-52 and bombing some city and saying, whoops, we didn't mean for that to occur."

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