A 2022 Defense Department report long withheld by the Biden administration has recently surfaced and reveals that seven U.S. service members showed COVID-19-like symptoms after having competed in the World Military Games in Wuhan, China, months before the deadly virus first broke out in the U.S.
The explosive disclosure suggests that the virus was circulating in Wuhan months before China disclosed it to the world in December 2019. The games took place in October 2019, two months earlier.
It also challenges the Biden administration’s public claims in 2021 that there was no evidence that any American participants contracted the virus at those games. The CIA, FBI and Energy Department have all now suggested that the COVID-19 virus pandemic may have originated via a lab leak from the city’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The 2022 report was legally required to be released publicly online more than two years ago ‘in a searchable format,’ but it only became available some time in late March, when the Trump administration uploaded it to a Defense Department website, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
The outlet reported that the Biden administration did send copies of the report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in December 2022, but the report was never made available online by the administration.
The report found that of the 263 U.S. delegation that traveled to the event, seven U.S. members showed COVID-19-like symptoms between Oct. 18, 2019 and Jan. 21, 2020. All symptoms were resolved within six days and could be attributed to other respiratory illnesses.
The report also found that there were no significant outbreaks of COVID-19-like symptoms at Defense Department facilities after the athletes returned, although service members were not tested for COVID-19 or antibodies as testing was not available at that early stage of the pandemic.
However, Washington was one of the earliest states to show a spike in COVID-19, and the U.S. team used chartered flights to and from the games via Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Prospect reported.
Then-Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told the Washington Post in June 2021 that the military had ‘no knowledge’ of any COVID-19 infections among the troops that participated in those games.
The Pentagon, during Trump’s first term, said in June 2020 that there was no reason to test members as the event was held ‘prior to the reported outbreak,’ Prospect reported.
Other international athletes reported having come down with COVID-19-like symptoms, the Daily Mail reported in June 2021.
The games have long been suspected as being a ‘super spreader’ event which took place close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance, partially funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health was conducting gain of function research there.
‘Many of the athletes said Wuhan looked like a ‘ghost town’ in October‚ two months before China reported the first case of coronavirus there,’ the New York Post reported.
Former Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., in 2021 said that those months were critical and could have helped the United States understand the disease and ‘shut down travel earlier in order to stop the spread and ultimately save potentially millions of lives.’