Keane: China has not given us the origin of coronavirus
Chinese government under scrutiny over COVID-19 origin; Fox News senior strategic analyst Gen. Jack Keane weighs in.
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Fox News senior strategic analyst Jack Keane, a retired four-star Army general, said on “America’s Newsroom” on Tuesday that China “had their hands all over the spread” of the new coronavirus.
“We don't know if it was intentional, but we clearly know it was reckless for sure and very deceptive,” he added.
Keane made the comments on the same day The Washington Post reported that a Chinese laboratory at the center of new theories about how the coronavirus pandemic started was the subject of multiple urgent warnings inside the U.S. State Department two years ago.
THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK STATE BY STATE
U.S. Embassy officials warned in January 2018 about inadequate safety at the Wuhan Institute of Virology lab and passed on information about scientists conducting risky research on coronavirus from bats, the newspaper reported on Tuesday.
Those cables have renewed speculation inside the U.S. government about whether Wuhan-based labs were the source of the novel coronavirus, although no firm connection has been established. The theory, however, has gained traction in recent days.
“We know for a fact that China has not given us what the origin of the diseases is,” Keane said on Tuesday. “By now if that disease had occurred in America, we would have been foreclosing that to the entire world.”
“Obviously, they have two labs that deal with this very thing in Wuhan city and now this report makes it very suspicious that that could possibly be the origin,” he continued, referencing Tuesday’s report in The Washington Post.
He also pointed out that China was “very deceptive about the actual spread of the epidemic.”
“They actually punished people,” Keane said. “They put it in writing that it wasn't human-to-human transmission. This is all going on in December and January."
"By the end of December we know they had 105 cases and 15 deaths and as late as mid-January the World Health Organization, after the director had gone to China, reported out that there were no human-to-human transmissions coming out of China,” Keane continued.
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“Then on the 23 of January President Xi shuts down ground traffic and air traffic coming out of Hubei province, and Wuhan city is in that province, but guess what? He does not shut down international flights so hundreds of thousands of Chinese were still on the move,” Keane continued, explaining his reasoning for thinking that China “had their hands all over the spread" of COVID-19.
Fox News’ Barnini Chakraborty contributed to this report.
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