Thread by @JerryDunleavy

I’ve spent a year writing about the CCP’s coronavirus cover-up & duplicity and the WHO’s incompetence & complicity, and so with a deeply flawed WHO-China report on COVID-19’s origins coming out in days, I figured I’d do a long thread on my stories from the past year. So… THREAD.

Numerous CCP diplomats engaged in a global disinfo campaign starting around March 2020, peddling falsehoods that COVID-19 didn’t start in China & may have originated with the U.S. military as they tried to distract from China’s duplicity & cover-up. 1/x
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Xi Jinping touted a March 2020 call he’d had with Putin, who expressed support for the CCP during China’s war of words with the U.S. over Beijing’s terrible response to the coronavirus & as China spread conspiracies about the origins of the pandemic. 2/x
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WaPo reported in March 2020 that the intel community warned Trump in early 2020 that the CCP was minimizing the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak & was lying about the scale of the crisis. Worth noting Trump’s China travel ban happened end of January. 3/x
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Twitter (indirectly) told me in March 2020 it wouldn’t ban the CCP officials who were spreading falsehoods on the origins of the coronavirus in China & who were blaming it on the U.S. (Twitter pointed me to their rules on world leaders using Twitter). 4/x
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House Foreign Affairs GOP's McCaul in March 2020 called for State Dept to pursue “multilateral investigation into CCP’s coronavirus coverup, which will underscore their pandemic-enabling malfeasance is not just an American concern, but a global one.” 5/x
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The State Dept Global Engagement Center’s Lea Gabrielle warned in March 2020 she’d seen “Russian, Chinese, and Iranian state disinformation and propaganda ecosystems all converge around some disinformation themes intended to promote their own agendas.” 6/x
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Pompeo said in late March 2020 the State Dept would do its "best to assist” Taiwan in gaining its “appropriate role” & observer status within the World Health Assembly (key WHO advisory group) as the U.S. ramped up criticisms of CCP’s covid cover-up. 7/x
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The intel community told senators in early April about the CCP coronavirus cover-up & it lying about its death toll, with Sasse saying “the Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, & will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.” 8/x
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Trump chastised the WHO in early April for its failures, criticized them for recommending against travel bans, suggested its screw-ups stemmed from a coziness with the CCP, and indicated his admin would reassess how much it contributed to the WHO. 9/x
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GOP senators voiced support for Trump’s suggestion the U.S. should pull funding for the WHO, with Graham saying in April the WHO was composed of "Chinese apologists" & had been "deceptive" & "slow” & wasn’t a good investment with its current leaders. 10/x
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A bipartisan group of lawmakers called on WHO & other international groups to push for a global ban on live wildlife markets (wet markets) in April (this was a top COVID-19 origins theory at the time) in an effort to “help prevent the next pandemic.” 11/x
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A bipartisan group of senators also called upon the CCP to ban all of its wet markets in April, arguing that the wet markets “have a potential to expose humans to health risks through the introduction of zoonotic disease into the human population.” 12/x
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House GOP called upon the WHO to hand over its internal communications with the CCP in April, arguing that “the WHO helped Beijing disseminate propaganda, downplayed the extent of the disease, and possibly delayed ordering a public health emergency.” 13/x
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In a story first broken by WaPo, it was revealed in April the U.S. Embassy in Beijing warned in sensitive cables in 2018 about big biosafety concerns at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a level 4 biosafety lab that was studying bat coronaviruses. 14/x
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It became clear by April that the U.S. military & intelligence community were seriously investigating the hypothesis that the novel coronavirus outbreak may have originated from an accidental escape from a Wuhan lab rather than in a Wuhan wet market. 15/x
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Unnamed sources told Fox News in April that there was “increasing confidence” that the Chinese government had blamed the wet market in Wuhan in an effort to deflect from how the novel coronavirus may have actually originated in the nearby Wuhan lab. 16/x
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Fox News also reported in April the IC was carrying out a full-scale investigation into the theory that the coronavirus detected in China in late 2019 may have originated via escape from a Wuhan lab, and Pompeo confirmed it was being taken seriously. 17/x
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Dr. Birx said in April that, as the outbreak began in China, the Chinese government clearly failed to live up to its “higher moral obligation” as the originating country to be transparent & honest about the transmissibility & deadliness of COVID-19. 18/x
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A host of experts contended in April that the CCP disinfo campaign was hard at work to distract the world from Beijing's failures in containing the COVID-19 outbreak, with former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman calling it “Xi Jinping’s Chernobyl.” 19/x
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And my cover story for our special April issue on China, titled “Crime Against Humanity: How China spread a global plague, then lied about it.” I laid out what was known about the CCP’s duplicity & malfeasance, and it holds up quite well a year later. 20/x
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The head of DOJ China Initiative Jon Demers said in late April it was “beyond absurd” to think CCP cyber or economic espionage would stop during a pandemic & warned “there is nothing more valuable today than biomedical research relating to vaccines.” 21/x
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The GOP members of the House Oversight Committee urged the Democratic-led committee in April to investigate the CCP’s influence over the WHO after Dem Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney had accused Trump of attacking the WHO to distract from his own failures. 22/x
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ODNI also announced in late April that “the IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging info & intel to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” 23/x
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A senior intel official told me in early May that a majority of the intel community’s then-17 spy agencies believed the coronavirus likely originated via accidental lab escape from the Wuhan lab, with dissenting agencies remaining open to the theory. 24/x
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DHS report dated May 1st said U.S. officials thought CCP leaders “intentionally concealed the severity” of COVID-19 & China “likely stockpiled medical supplies for domestic use before its official notification to the WHO that COVID-19 was contagious.” 25/x
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The WHO denied a report in May that said Chinese President Xi Jinping had pressured WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to conceal the truth about the coronavirus outbreak during a January phone call. 26/x
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GOP China Taskforce leader Michael McCaul concluded in May that the CCP violated the World Health Assembly’s International Health Regulations through its coronavirus cover-up & that the WHO failed to follow its own guidelines during the outbreak. 27/x
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The FBI and DHS’s Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released a May warning about Chinese hackers as part of a U.S. government effort “to raise awareness of the threat to COVID-19-related research” by CCP cyber actors. 28/x
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The WHO’s member states unanimously approved a May resolution calling for an “impartial” and “independent” investigation of the agency’s widely criticized response to the coronavirus outbreak during a meeting of the World Health Assembly. 29/x
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House Republicans demanded in May that the Democratic-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis call the WHO’s director & China’s ambassador to the U.S. to testify, in an effort to hold them "accountable" for their response to the outbreak. 30/x
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Internal documents & recordings released in June showed that WHO’s leaders privately complained among themselves in January 2020 about China’s delays & lack of transparency even as the WHO publicly praised the CCP’s response to the coronavirus. 31/x
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House Foreign Affairs GOP released a June report saying the CCP “bears overwhelming responsibility" for the coronavirus becoming a pandemic after concealing “the spread & novel nature” of the disease. They also called for WHO’s leadership to be fired. 32/x
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The WHO was forced in July to correct its own published timeline of events when it backtracked on its assertion that the CCP had alerted the WHO about the coronavirus. Incredibly, the CCP had never actually formally told WHO about the Wuhan outbreak. 33/x
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A senior official confirmed in July that “the U.S.'s notice of withdrawal” from the WHO “effective July 6, 2021, has been submitted to the UN secretary-general, who is the depository for the WHO.” The Biden Admin made rejoining the WHO a top promise. 34/x
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GOP senators introduced the Civil Justice for Victims of COVID-19 Act in July, which would strip the Chinese government of its sovereign immunity & let U.S. citizens sue China in federal court for damages over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak. 35/x
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The Justice Department accused two Chinese hackers — working for the benefit of the Ministry of State Security and other CCP entities — of seeking to steal coronavirus research in the United States & around the world in a pretty wild July indictment. 36/x
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House GOP Foreign Affairs report concluded in September that if the CCP had responded to COVID-19 responsibly & transparently “it is likely the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented.” It also said the WHO “repeatedly parroted CCP talking points.” 37/x
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Pompeo demanded in December that the CCP release Chinese citizen journalist Zhang Zhao, who was sentenced to four years in prison late last year for her reporting on the ground in Wuhan amid the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020. 38/x
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Trump deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger said in January “there's a growing body of evidence to say that a laboratory leak or accident is very much a credible possibility.” He also called the China-WHO investigation a “Potemkin exercise.” 39/x
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Nunes sent a letter to Ratcliffe in January asking for an intel assessment on “the origin of SARS-COV-2, research activities in Wuhan labs, efforts by China to block international investigations” and on the CCP actions that exacerbated the pandemic. 40/x
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Pompeo said in January that we “still don’t know the answer” about the specific origin of COVID-19 — whether nature or a lab escape — but “everything that we have seen indicates that this began not only inside of China but at Hubei province, Wuhan.” 41/x
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Trump State Department released declassified fact sheet in mid-January, saying U.S. intel believed the Wuhan Institute of Virology engaged in secret military experiments & conducted gain-of-function research & that lab workers fell ill in autumn 2019. 42/x
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Republicans in Congress said in February the Congressional Gold Medal should be awarded to Li Wenliang, a Chinese whistleblower doctor who warned of early covid cases in December 2019, was silenced by the CCP, & reportedly contracted COVID-19 & died. 43/x
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Peter Ben Embarek, head of the WHO team investigating COVID-19 origins, suggested WHO would not keep investigating Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, deeming it “extremely unlikely” during a February press conference in Wuhan conducted alongside CCP flacks. 44/x
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Peter Daszak, who used NIH money to fund bat coronavirus studies at Wuhan lab, spent the 24 hours after the China-WHO press conference tweeting & going on CCP outlets to attack critics of China/WHO and criticizing Biden Admin skepticism of the report. 45/x
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Ratcliffe responded to all of this by saying that “I think what the WHO came out & said yesterday was disingenuous. Mike Pompeo & I worked very hard to get some of our best intelligence out… so we could talk about what we knew about China & COVID.” 46/x
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WHO Director-General Tedros then walked back Ben Embarek’s shortly thereafter, saying, “Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open & require further study.” 47/x
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WHO’s Ben Embarek himself, who first appeared to rule out the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis entirely, then sorta kinda backed off from that too in mid-February, saying that it remains “on the table” and under consideration and would require further study. 48/x
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Biden national security adviser Jake Sullivan criticized China for blocking data on COVID-19, but declined to stand by the declassified U.S. intel during a February interview, saying we need a “transparent international investigation led by” the WHO. 49/x
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Pottinger argued in February: “If you weigh the circumstantial evidence, the ledger on the side of an explanation that says this resulted from some kind of human error, it far outweighs the side of the scale that says this was some natural outbreak.” 50/x
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Two dozen GOP House members demanded in February that HHS’s inspector general conduct a “prompt & thorough investigation into the NIH’s response to biosafety concerns” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which had gotten taxpayer funds via Daszak.) 51/x
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WHO’s Ben Embarek then admitted in early March that “we didn’t do an audit of any of these labs, so we don’t really have hard facts or detailed data on the work done” at the Wuhan lab, tho he still downplayed the likelihood COVID-19 originated there. 52/x
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Tedros said the China-WHO executive summary & full report would be released simultaneously by mid-March (nope!) while two dozen scientists wrote a letter saying a truly independent investigation was needed to understand how COVID-19 began in China. 53/x
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Jen Psaki then said that the Biden Admin deserved some credit for WHO’s delay on releasing the COVID-19 origins report, saying the delay “was a positive step, which was taken, in part, because of our involvement and engagement.” 54/x
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WaPo reported in March that a Biden State Department official said “no one is disputing the information” in the declassified fact sheet which alleged that there had been military experiments, gain of function research, & sick workers at the Wuhan lab. 55/x
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WHO team member Daszak defended Wuhan lab decision to pull down its viral sample database from public view in March interview & gave cover to CCP blocking the COVID-19 origins investigation for so long, blaming “anti-China political rhetoric” in U.S. 56/x
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In an interview with me, Pompeo cast doubt on the credibility of the WHO-China investigation into the origins of COVID-19 and he defended the declassified intelligence that provided circumstantial evidence pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 57/x
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I think the full transcript of my interview with Pompeo is worth reading, as he describes CCP's duplicity & COVID-19 cover-up, defends declassified State Dept intel, warns of lack of data & transparency in the WHO-China report, & discusses Wuhan lab. 58/x
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Shi Zhengli — a top scientist at the Wuhan lab and friend of Daszak known as “bat lady” for her work with bat viruses — denied the State Department fact sheet’s claim that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had secretly worked with the Chinese military. 59/x
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Dr. Robert Redfield, former CDC Director under Trump, revealed that “I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory — escaped” & suggested it was due to gain-of-function research. 60/x
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Jen Psaki then said that the Biden Admin was basically in wait-and-see mode ahead of the upcoming release of the WHO-China report, saying, “The WHO is examining this and will be releasing a report soon. We’ll review that report once it’s available.” 61/x
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What's wild is I didn't even include stories on CCP espionage & hacking, Thousand Talents, Huawei, Confucius Institutes, Fox Hunt, CCP national security threat, Chinese influence ops targeting lawmakers, Microsoft hack, China strategy docs, etc. China is up to lots of bad stuff.