Another congressional report concluded that the COVID pandemic was most likely caused by a ‘laboratory leak’ from a Chinese institution.
The 302-page Senate report, he got Axioshighlights a series of previous failures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the fact that there are no known naturally occurring incidents of COVID-19.
“The preponderance of the information confirms the plausibility of a potentially unintended research incident resulting from the failure of biosafety containment during vaccine research,” the report states.
The authors said the evidence was “circumstantial,” and they were hampered by China’s lack of cooperation. But they are still confident that the virus escaped from the Wuhan laboratory.
Joe Biden has ordered all documents from the US government about the virus to be made public.
A picture of a doctor at work in Wuhan in February 2020
Many analysts now believe that COVID-19 originated in this laboratory, in Wuhan, China
Richard Burr, who stepped down as senator in January, oversaw the report when he was the minority leader on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Chinese researchers began developing at least two COVID-19 vaccines in November 2019 — a month before the first cases were reported, in China. The first case was confirmed in the United States on January 20, 2020.
The vaccine ‘means that SARS-CoV-2 was present in WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) prior to the known epidemic,’ the authors wrote.
However, they note that there is no actual evidence of COVID-19 within the Wuhan Institute.
They conclude that the epidemic most likely started with a lab leak, but it’s very likely that we’ll never know for sure.
China has insisted that the virus is transmitted naturally from animals to humans, and has denied reports of a laboratory leak.
Titled “Muddy Waters: The Origin of COVID-19,” the report was endorsed by Sen. Richard Burr, a Republican representing North Carolina.
He resigned in January.
Burr, a Republican who served as Minority Leader on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, worked on the report until leaving Congress.
A summary was released in January: On Monday, Axios got the full version.
A summary of the report (above) was released in January: the full version was published on Monday
The Burr report was written by Robert Kadlec, former HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response during the Trump administration.
A senior aide to Bohr, who presented the report to Axios, said the report was somewhat abandoned when Bohr left office, but it was still a useful contribution to the debate.
“Since the team did not complete its work before Senator Burr left office, this has become a homeless product,” said the former aide.
Former Senator Burr did not review this document nor did it go through the same vetting process as last year’s executive summary document, but this is worth reporting, in my opinion, and reflects the quality of the work done by the team.
Kadlec, a physician and retired Air Force colonel, said he believes China was excited about exploring the COVID-19 virus after their country was battered by SARS from 2002 to 2004. SARS killed 8,000 people worldwide — more than 5,000 of them in China.
“I think there is a really logical sense to what the Chinese might do in terms of SARS coronavirus vaccines because they saw the impact of SARS on their country,” Kadlec said.
“They had more than enough reason — as we did after 9/11 — to try and do things to protect ourselves,” he told Axios.
The Bohr-Kadlec report is the latest congressional paper to conclude that the lab leakage theory was likely.
Donald Trump with Robert Kadlec (left), CDC Director Robert Redfield (second right), and Mike Pence on February 26, 2020
In September 2020, Michael McCaul, a Republican who serves as minority leader on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, did not blame the Wuhan lab — but the Chinese authorities for covering up the outbreak.
“Undoubtedly, the Chinese Communist Party actively engaged in a cover-up aimed at obfuscating data, masking relevant public health information, and cracking down on doctors and journalists who tried to warn the world,” says McCall’s report.
By responding in a transparent and responsible manner, the CCP was able to support the global public health response and share information with the world on how to deal with the virus.
It is likely that the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented had they done so, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and the world from economic collapse.
Democrats seemed less concerned with the origins of the pandemic, and more focused on the mistakes of the Trump administration.
In December 2022, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released its final report, which argues that structural weaknesses, leadership failures and the spread of misinformation have contributed to the deaths of more than 1 million Americans during the pandemic.
When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, the focus shifted again to the origins of the pandemic.
In January, the US Department of Energy concluded with “low confidence” that the pandemic “likely” originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, according to a confidential report shared with members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.
A month later, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the FBI believed COVID may have originated from a “possible laboratory incident” in Wuhan. But he added that the Chinese government had blocked the work of FBI investigators.
Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in March told the House Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic — now controlled by Republicans — that he believed the virus likely originated in the Chinese laboratory.
“Based on my initial analysis of the data, I came to believe and continue to believe today that it indicated that COVID-19 was more likely the result of an accidental lab leak than a natural indirect event,” Redfield told the panel. .
“This conclusion is based primarily on the biology of the virus itself.”
