https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/27/a_china-us_cold_war_143042.h
China’s problems are mounting. As Beijing works frantically to cover up its responsibility for the global pandemic, Western intelligence is trying to find out exactly how the outbreak began and how much China’s leaders knew. It is already clear that China’s secrecy and deception imposed huge costs in lives and livelihoods around the world. Their regime will pay a heavy price as world politics is reshaped to see China as a dangerous adversary, not a benign partner.
U.S. intelligence agencies, working with epidemiologists, believe that the new virus first detected in Wuhan was a natural strain, not a man-made bioweapon. What they still don’t know is whether it spread from a wild bat or, as they increasingly believe, from poor containment at a virology lab. They still don’t know the identity of “patient zero.” They still haven’t been able to visit the region, the lab, or its researchers. They still haven’t been able to review essential medical data, much of it now deliberately destroyed. Chinese researchers and early patients have disappeared and may be dead. Official tallies of the dead and infected are obvious fakes. It’s a grim picture. The orchestrated coverup by the Chinese Communist Party cannot obscure it.
Despite this bodyguard of lies, Western intelligence agencies are confident the CCP’s top officials knew in December that the virus was highly contagious. Internal communications reveal party officials discussing the problem in mid-January, even as they told the world the opposite.