President Joe Biden was not aware for days that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was hospitalized, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan ultimately informed Biden late Thursday afternoon, soon after Sullivan himself learned Austin had been hospitalized, the source said. Austin was admitted to the hospital on New Year’s Day due to complications from an elective surgery.
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Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks periodically assumed the duties of the defense secretary while she was on vacation in Puerto Rico during the time Austin was hospitalized, two US officials said. Hicks had arrived in Puerto Rico prior to Austin’s hospitalization.
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The congressional oversight committees were not notified of Austin’s hospitalization until Friday night, according to three congressional aides familiar with the matter.
*But anonymous sources, at the State Department, told me that ‘patient zero’ had COVID-19! 🙄
Cleared by Congress, legislation later signed by US President Joe Biden in March ordered the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to declassify information regarding the potential origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The measure forced the DNI to declassify its report within 90 days.
Hu and two of his WIV colleagues were thrown into the furious COVID-19 origin debate on 13 June when an online newsletter called Public said the three scientists developed COVID-19 in November 2019. That was prior to the outbreak becoming public when a cluster of cases at the end of December 2019 surfaced in people linked to a Wuhan marketplace. Public’s report was quickly embraced by a camp that argues COVID-19 came from a virus stored, and possibly manipulated, at WIV, rather than from infected animal hosts, perhaps being sold at the Wuhan market. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on 20 June that said it had “confirmed” the allegations against the three, without referring to any public evidence or named sources with direct knowledge, fueled the flames even more. Social media and other publications spread the charges—and the scientists’ names.
A few days ago, the general director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated that the introduction of travel restrictions by several countries was an “irrational response” to the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
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