A two-year investigation into the pandemic in the US has concluded Covid-19 was likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory.
The Republican-controlled House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 520-page report on the federal and state-level response as well as the pandemic's origins and vaccination efforts.
In a letter to Congress, panel chairman Brad Wanstrup said the findings could help the U.S. and the world predict and protect themselves from another pandemic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership. Trust is earned. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust,” he said.
“A future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias. We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must. It can be done.”
The research has pushed forward to find evidence that the pandemic was lab-born after Dr Anthony Fauci released a publication to push the narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.
The five strongest arguments found by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for the “lab leak” theory are:
- The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
- Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
- Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
- Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
- By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
The congressional panel became persuaded by the lab leak theory after meeting 25 times, conducting 30 transcribed interviews and reviewing more than one million pages of documents.
Despite these findings, US federal agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO) and scientists across the world have all arrived at different conclusions as to the most likely origin of the pandemic and no consensus has emerged.
