Sunday, during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) highlighted how cell phone data suggests the Chinese government had closed the roads around the Wuhan Institute of Virology in mid-October.
This is significant, as Cotton points out, that some believe the Wuhan facility is the origin of the COVID-19 virus.
“Reports emerged yesterday in the media that publicly available cell phone data suggests that roads around the lab in Wuhan was closed in the middle of October,” he said. “Again, this information is publicly available. American media has used it to analyze mobility patterns in states to see if our people are practicing social distancing. So the reports indicate that on major roads around these labs, Wuhan, you obviously had thousands and thousands of cell phones pinging towers day in and day out. And then, all of a sudden, it stopped. And it remained stopped for several days. That would suggest, without any further information, that those roads were blocked for some reason.”
“Now, we need to go confirm that,” Cotton continued. “We need to look at the data carefully. We also need to try to use other means to verify if there were, in fact, shutdowns of roads around those labs in the middle of October. The Chinese Communist Party could obviously help us with that if they would open up and allow us to investigate what happened in Wuhan. But if it is confirmed that roads around that lab were shut down for a number of days in mid-October, it is highly coincidental that there was a major shutdown of those roads at about the time one might have expected this virus to first get transmitted to humans, whatever the origins may have been. But this would be another piece of circumstantial evidence that there was some kind of accident or outbreak from those labs, not from the seafood market or anywhere else. That’s why it’s so important we get to the bottom of this data.”
As Cotton explains, Wuhan is larger than New York City, and closing roads as the government had would require a significant reason.
“Remember, Wuhan is a city that is larger than New York City. So, obviously, its roads are highly trafficked and heavily congested. So to shut down roads around the lab would suggest that they had some good reason to disrupt traffic patterns so severely. So, again, first, we need to verify these reports, the cell phone data say what these media reports indicate, and then we need to use other sources to try to confirm what they suggest, which is, those roads were shut down. And if that’s the case, if roads were shut down around these laboratories for several days in mid-October, then we need to figure out exactly why, because it’s simply another piece of circumstantial evidence that would support the idea that this virus originated from one of those labs.”
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