House Intelligence Committee Republicans are arguing that there is “significant circumstantial evidence” to support that the COVID-19 outbreak originated from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China.
In a report released on Wednesday, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Republicans said it is “crucial for health experts and the U.S. government to understand how the COVID-19 virus originated” to prevent “or quickly mitigate future pandemics,” according to Fox News.
The Republicans are calling for “more pressure” to be put on China by the U.S. federal government for a “full, credible investigation.”
“To protect American citizens from future pandemics, the U.S. Government must place more pressure on China to allow full, credible investigations of the source of the COVID-19 pandemic and to allow probes of the likelihood that it resulted from a lab leak. The U.S. Government must also provide a full accounting of any American cooperation with the Wuhan lab’s coronavirus research, including the support of these projects through U.S. Government funds.”
The report adds, “International efforts to discover the true source of the virus, however, have been stymied by a lack of cooperation from the People’s Republic of China. Nevertheless, significant circumstantial evidence raises serious concerns that the COVID-19 outbreak may have been a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
The Republicans also noted China’s “history of research lab leaks resulting in infections.” Additionally, they noted that “several researchers in the Wuhan lab were sickened with COVID-19-like symptoms” in the Fall of 2019.
They also pointed to the “involvement in the Wuhan lab of the Chinese military, which has a documented biological weapons program,” among other points that Republicans listed what they saw as evidence.
“By contrast, little circumstantial evidence has emerged to support the PRC’s claim that COVID-19 was a natural occurrence, having jumped from some other species to human,” the Republican lawmakers wrote.
This comes after Nunes and other Republican lawmakers wrote letters to President Joe Biden and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, in requesting all of the intelligence community’s information on COVID-19 origins. They set a deadline of May 31 to start receiving the information.
Former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield said in a CNN interview in March that COVID-19 could have originated in Wuhan in September/October of 2019. Redfield also said that he believes COVID-19 most likely “was from a laboratory” in Wuhan, China, that “escaped.”
“I do not believe this somehow came from a bat to a human,” he said.
The current CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, was asked by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) on Wednesday for her opinion on where COVID-19 originated, as IJR reported.
“I don’t believe I’ve seen enough data, individual data for me to be able to comment on that,” Walensky said, before being asked what the possibilities are.
She said, “Most coronaviruses that we know of are of origin that have infected the population … generally come from an animal origin and … certainly a lab-based origin is one possibility.”