Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., told Newsmax on Monday that the CIA's new assessment on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic shows that China is "covering up" the evidence of a lab leak.
The CIA on Saturday, just a few days after the swearing in of Director John Ratcliffe, announced that the likeliest cause of the pandemic was a lab leak, not the virus spreading from an infected animal, as the agency previously contended.
"We have low confidence in this judgment and will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting or open-source information that could change CIA's assessment," a CIA spokesperson, whose name was not given, told reporters from various news outlets in an email.
McCormick said on "National Report" that the agency's new assessment is the result of "deductive reasoning" and accused the Chinese government of "covering up" the origins of the virus.
"We had hearings on this all year. Last year I was on the COVID committee. Obviously, I'm an ER doc; I was on the front lines of the pandemic for two years serving night shifts and from basically from the beginning to the end. I know darn well, anybody who studies epidemiology and how diseases start and where they go, they don't just disappear."
He added that investigators "never found that China tested hundreds of thousands of animals. They couldn't find anything. They couldn't find a reservoir because most diseases and viruses don't cross over."
McCormick said that swine flu and avian flu are "very rare," adding that COVID-19 "didn't come from an animal reservoir. It didn't come from the wet market."
He said: "We know that Wuhan was doing advanced technologies on advance of function, and we know that that's where it came from. It's obvious. It's deductive reasoning.
"When you have people who are studying this stuff disappear, when they won't let you have access to their records, you know they're covering up. It's obvious where this came from. It was the epicenter of the disease. This should come as no surprise to anyone."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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