Gordon Chang: China and WHO acted maliciously, tried to deceive the world

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China and the World Health Organization's (WHO) attempts to knowingly deceive the world on the threat of coronavirus were malicious and will see swift retribution, Foreign Affairs journalist Gordon Chang said Saturday.

Appearing on "Fox & Friends Weekend" with hosts Jillian Mele, Griff Jenkins, and Pete Hegseth, Chang explained that the WHO has been bolstering China's story from the very beginning.

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"And, by the way...there is a lot of evidence that suggests this comes from the lab. A January 24th article from The Lancet -- which is the authoritative British medical journal -- said that many of the initial coronavirus cases did not come from the wet market, which is China's theory," he stated. "Well, if they didn't come from the wet market, they had to have come from the lab."

U.S. intelligence has not made a firm determination about the origins, but China critics in the Trump administration are talking more openly this past week about the lab theory. Scientists who have studied the virus say nothing has been proven conclusively. However, the market theory they say is still considered far more probable than the lab theory.

On Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a similar accusation in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on the Fox Business Network.

“This authoritarian regime had information, had data. It’s very clear now that the Chinese Communist Party and the World Health Organization didn’t put that information out into the international space as they’re required to do in a timely fashion.”

“We are still asking the Chinese Communist Party to allow experts to get in to that virology lab so that we can determine precisely where this virus began.  It’s not political.  This is about science and epidemiology,” Pompeo added.

Fox News first reported on Wednesday that there is increasing confidence that the outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan lab, not as a bioweapon but as part of a Chinese effort to show that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal or greater than those of the U.S.  So far the Trump administration has not offered any proof.

U.S. officials and the intelligence community have confirmed to Fox News that they have dismissed the theory that the coronavirus was man-made or engineered inside China as some sort of bioweapons. The Pentagon’s top doctor dismissed the “bioweapon” theory earlier this month.

“To be clear, there is nothing to that,” Air Force Brig. Gen. (Dr.) Paul Friedrichs, the Joint Staff surgeon, told reporters April 6th. “I am not worried about this as a bioweapon.”

In addition, Fox News has learned since that the United States is conducting a full-scale investigation into whether the novel coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The U.S. military’s top officer made the announcement Tuesday.

“We've had a lot of intelligence take a hard look at that. I would just say at this point, it's inconclusive. Although the weight of evidence seems to indicate natural, but we don't know for certain," Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters at the Pentagon.

The next day, Pompeo also said an investigation was underway.

“We do know is we know that this virus originated in Wuhan, China.  We know that there is the Wuhan Institute of Virology just a handful of miles away from where the wet market was.  There’s still lots to learn.  You should know that the United States Government is working diligently to figure this out,” Pompeo told Martha MacCallum during a live interview.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Esper accused China of not being honest with the U.S. government.

“I find it hard to trust much of what comes out of the Chinese communist party. They've been misleading us they have been opaque if you will from the early days of this virus. I don't have much faith that they're even being truthful with us now,” Esper said Thursday on NBC’s “Today” show.

Intelligence operatives are said to be gathering information about the laboratory and the initial outbreak of the virus. Intelligence analysts are piecing together a timeline of what the government knew and “creating an accurate picture of what happened,” the sources said.

Once that investigation is complete, the findings will be presented to the Trump administration.

"All I can say is wherever it came from -- it came from China, in whatever form -- 184 countries are suffering because of it. And it's too bad, isn't it? It could have been solved very easily when it was just starting," President Trump told reporters at his daily White House coronavirus briefing.

"The WHO from the get-go has been in China's pocket and that's because the Director General [Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus] was essentially put there with the Chinese marketing campaign. So, that's the way he was elected," Chang remarked. "He is a communist anyway, so you can see the connections there."

Chang told the "Friends Weekend" hosts he believes the director-general and other senior leadership will be removed from the organization, adding that he believes great work being done by other WHO doctors and professionals is being "nullified."

"I believe the WHO senior leadership knew that they were not telling the truth because on December 31st Taiwan told the WHO that this was [human-to-human]," Chang pointed out. "And, clearly, Chinese leaders themselves knew some time from around the second or third week of when doctors in Wuhan saw that it was human-to-human transmissible but Beijing did not admit that until January 20."

"And, the thing is not only just keeping quiet would have been dangerously irresponsible, what they did was out-and-out tried to deceive the world," he continued further. "So, when you look at China's actions and [the] WHO's actions: it's malicious."

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Chang believes that China realizes the truth of the deadly virus's origins is so explosive they might not survive the resulting investigation.

"The claims for compensation -- which inevitably will arise as we are starting to see in the U.S. -- that would just, I think, sink China," he concluded. "And so, they believe that they have no choice but to lie about this for as long as they possibly can and hope that they can sort of get through the white heat."

Fox News’ Bret Baier, Gillian Turner, Adam Shaw, Barnini Chakraborty, and Gregg Re contributed to this report.