If US intelligence had heeded the warning of a prominent Chinese dissident, we might not be in Year 2 of a global pandemic.
In November 2019, six weeks before Beijing deigned to admit the coronavirus outbreak, democracy fighter Wei Jingsheng sounded the alarm about a mysterious new virus he’d first heard about around the time of the World Military Games in Wuhan in October 2019, according to a new book, “What Really Happened in Wuhan.”
Wei, a former Chinese Communist Party insider who spent 18 years in a Chinese gulag for speaking out against the CCP, shared his concerns with intelligence agencies, a US politician with ties to the president and Chinese human-rights activist Dimon Liu.
But his warnings went unheard.
“I felt they [intelligence agencies] were not as heavily concerned as I was so I tried my best to provide more detailed information. They may not believe there is [a] government of a country that would do something like that [cover up a deadly outbreak]. So I kept repeating myself in an effort to try to persuade them,” Wei said.
If the intel community had started checking it out back then, perhaps the West would’ve realized in time that COVID-19 was a serious threat. After his unheard alarms of October 2019, it would take Beijing two more months, on Dec. 31, to even notify the World Health Organization of the dangers and another 19 days to admit the evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Perhaps US intel and public-heath officials still need to learn what Wei knows all too well: Never trust Beijing.