The ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Monday released new details about the origins of COVID-19, outlining further evidence that the virus originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and pointing to efforts by Chinese officials and potentially U.S. citizens to cover up the leak.
The new evidence, provided in an update to Rep. Michael T. McCaul’s September 2020 report on the origins of COVID-19, suggests the virus, which had been genetically manipulated, was released from the WIV accidentally in September 2019, according to the report’s authors.
“As we continue to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe it’s time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak,” said Mr. McCaul, Texas Republican. “Instead, as this report lays out, a preponderance of the evidence proves that all roads lead to the WIV.”
The conclusion is based on an analysis of open source information including published research, public and confidential People’s Republic of China (PRC) publications and information gathered from emails, interviews and social media.
The investigating team noted in the report several key items pointing to a leak including the unexplained removal of a WIV virus database in September 2019, safety concerns expressed by PRC officials and unusually scheduled maintenance at the lab at around the same time.
The authors also point to several athletes at the Military World Games in Wuhan who fell ill with COVID-19-like symptoms in October 2019, an uptick in hospitalizations in the region surrounding the lab the same month and the appointment of a People’s Liberation Army bioweapons expert to head the Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) as early as 2019.
“We know gain-of-function research was happening at the WIV, and we know it was being done in unsafe conditions,” Mr. McCaul said. “We also now know the head of the Chinese CDC and the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 lab publicly expressed concerns about safety at PRC labs in the summer of 2019. It is our belief the virus leaked sometime in late August or early September 2019.”
The report also concludes that WIV researchers, Chinese officials and potentially U.S. citizens worked to suppress information related to the investigation into the virus’ origins and “suppress public debate of a possible lab leak.”
Notably, the report points to the lengths the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the World Health Organization went to cover up the outbreak early on including the CCP detaining doctors and journalists, destroying lab samples and barring a full-scale investigation into the origins by the International community.
“This was the greatest coverup of all time and has caused the deaths of more than four million people around the world, and people must be held responsible,” Mr. McCaul said.
The report comes as Congress escalates bipartisan calls to hold China accountable for the COVID-19 pandemic. In May, the Senate included measures to end federal funding for the WIV and all gain-of-function research in China as part of the Innovation and Competition Act, which passed 68-32.
Last month, the House Appropriations Committee passed several measures attached to spending bills that would end U.S. taxpayer funding for the WIV, cut funding for certain medical experiments in China and investigate why COVID-19 gene sequencing data was removed from the National Institutes of Health.
House Republicans in June held a hearing into the origins of the virus and said overwhelming evidence points to the virus stemming from research at the WIV. The panel included testimony from four public health professionals who contend that evidence points to the virus originating from the lab, rather than through naturally occurring infectious disease transmission.
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