Damning Republican report into Wuhan lab claims COVID LEAKED out in September 2019 shortly after it tried to improve air safety and waste treatment systems
Coronavirus first leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan in September 2019, shortly after the Chinese research facility tried to improve air safety and waste treatment systems, a damning report by Republicans has claimed.
The report also cited 'ample evidence' that scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology - aided by U.S. experts and Chinese and U.S. government funds - were working to modify coronaviruses to infect humans and such manipulation could be hidden.
Its authors cited a stream of open source information, including satellite imagery showing a surge in visitors to local hospitals, long before cases were reported emerging from a nearby market.
And it reports how scientific papers written by researchers prove the WIV was doing dangerous genetic modification research - so-called 'gain of function' experiments - in unsafe laboratories.
'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 Rep. Mike McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as he released the report by the panel's GOP staff.
'Instead, as this report lays out, a preponderance of the evidence proves that all roads lead to the WIV.
'We know gain-of-function research was happening at the WIV and we know it was being done in unsafe conditions.'
He demanded a bipartisan investigation into the origins of a pandemic that has now claimed 4.4 million lives around the world.
An addendum to a report being compiled by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, adds further evidence to the theory that the Covid-19 first emerged from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Researchers work at a lab in at the Wuhan institute. Republicans in a House committee are compiling a report that seeks to prove the virus was made in one of the labs and escaped sometime before Sept. 12, 2019
While China has tried to insist the virus originated naturally, academics and politicians have started to contemplate the possibility it leaked from a high-level biochemical lab in Wuhan - raising suspicions that Chinese officials simply hid evidence of the early spread. A graphic shows the official Chinese timeline of the Covid pandemic and how it didn't raise the alarm until December 31
Rep. Mike McCaul said the report showed how the evidence pointed to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology before China acknowledged the emergence of a new disease
What is Gain of Function research?
Gain of Function Research is a controversial practice that involves altering a virus or pathogen in order to study the development of new diseases and their transmission.
Scientists conducting GOF research modify naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious so that they can replicate in human cells in a lab.
This allows the virus's potential effects on humans to be studied and better understood. GOF has been considered controversial due to its inherent biosafety risks.
In 2014, the Obama administration imposed a moratorium on GOF which included halting funding for projects, however, this decision was overturned three years later by the National Institute of Health .
On May 25, 2021, White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci defended funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a $600,000 grant given to the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, to study whether bat coronaviruses could be transmitted to humans.
He said the research was essential, pointing out that the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s was eventually traced back to bats.
However, Fauci claimed that under the terms of the funding, scientists were not to use the money on Gain of Function research.
China denies the virus leaked from a laboratory and the early scientific consensus was that it most likely emerged naturally, leaping from a host animal to humans, perhaps at a market near the WIV.
But that consensus was thrown into doubt when a string of scientists said they could not be sure of the pandemic's origins. As a result, President Biden ordered the intelligence community to look again at the question.
The new report cites open source data and claims that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab before September 12, 2019.
Its evidence includes satellite imagery showing increased activity at hospitals around the WIV's headquarters, as well as an spike in the use of internet search terms related to COVID-19 symptoms.
Those data were reported last year and disputed by some experts.
But the report also cited what it called new and under-reported information about safety protocols at the lab, including a July 2019 request for a $1.5 million overhaul of a hazardous waste treatment system for the facility, which was less than two years old.
'Such a significant renovation so soon after the facility began operation appears unusual,' Republican staff on committee wrote in their report.
The renovations, they wrote, 'all raise questions about how well these systems were functioning in the months prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.'
On September 12, Wuhan University called for laboratory inspections, and hours later the lab's viral sequence database was taken off the web.
That all pointed to a cover-up after a leak from the BSL-4 - the highest level of biosecurity - facility, said McCaul.
'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,' he said.
'It is our belief the virus leaked sometime in late August or early September 2019.
'When they realized what happened, Chinese Communist Party officials and scientists at the WIV began frantically covering up the leak, including taking their virus database offline in the middle of the night and requesting more than $1 million for additional security.'
According to the report, Dr. Shi Zhen-Li, a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute was questioned in an email why the database was removed from the internet.
Zen-Li, had in the past 'given several conflicting answers' regarding the disappearance of the database, the report noted, and replied that she would not answer further questions.
'No trust, no conversation,' she wrote.
Shortly after the removal of the database, the lab requested bids for additional security at the lab, such as 'gatekeepers, guards, video surveillance, security patrols, and people to handle the 'registration and reception of foreign personnel,' according to house Republicans' report.
Other pieces of evidence compiled include that Major General Chen Wei, a biology and chemical weapons defense expert, had taken control of one of the institute's labs in late 2019.
Further proof of the earlier timeline, the committee Republicans say, includes international press reports that the World Military Games, hosted in Wuhan in October, 2019, were held without fans.
Later, athletes who attended the games, the report says, developed Covid-like symptoms in November and December, 2019.
The report also says that Yu Chuanhua, the Vice President of the Hubei Health Statistics and Information Society had tried to retract statements he made in a Feb. 27 interview with Health Times in which he spoke of a patient who had become sick with Covid-19 in September, 2019, as well as two other cases in November.
Dr. Shi Zhen-Li a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute has said she would not answer further questions regarding whether the virus had leaked from one of her labs
The report claims the attempt was likely in response to a Chinese gag order as news of the coronavirus spread.
The House Republicans on the committee also seek to argue that the virus was possibly genetically modified, and cite an interview with Dr. Ralph Baric, who had collaborated with the Wuhan lab, in which he said it was possible to engineer a virus, 'without leaving a trace.'
That will reignite a long running row about whether the federal government may have funded dangerous research.
For example, Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci have clashed repeatedly over gain-of-function research and a $600,000 grant the National Institutes of Health gave to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014. Paul accused the country's top infectious disease expert of misleading Congress when he said the US had never funded gain-of-function research at the WIV.
The report accused Peter Daszak, whose EcoHealth Alliance funneled the U.S. funding to China, and WIV scientists of taking part in the cover-up.
'Their actions include bullying other scientists who questioned whether the virus could have leaked from a lab; misleading the world about how a virus can be modified without leaving a trace; and, in many, instances directly lying about the nature of the research they were conducting, as well as the low-level safety protocols they were using for that research,' it said.
McCaul said it was time to get to the truth.
'Now is the time to use all of the tools the U.S. government has to continue to root out the full truth of how this virus came to be,' he said.
'That includes subpoenaing Peter Daszak to appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to answer the many questions his inconsistent – and in some instances outright and knowingly inaccurate – statements have raised.
'It also includes Congress passing legislation to sanction scientists at the WIV and CCP officials who participated in this coverup.'
Republicans on the committee will submit the full report in September.
The report also claimed the facility had sought to improve its waste management and ventilation systems.
The facilities seeking the renovations were part of the Wuhan National Biosafety Lab, and had been operational for less than two years.
The information regarding the lab's procurement posting for the renovations will be included as an addendum by staff for McCaul.
It's not clear why the lab requested the bids or if the work was actually carried out, but the information is intended to add more to evidence Republicans on the committee are compiling to suggest that the coronavirus accidentally leaked from Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The report will come as an intelligence review ordered by the Biden administration into the origins of the virus is expected to release its findings.
Fauci v Paul: The debate over gain-of-function research and the $600K NIH grant to the Wuhan lab
Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci have been at loggerheads over gain-of-function research and a $600,000 grant the National Institutes of Health gave to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2014.
Gain of Function Research is a controversial practice that involves altering a virus or pathogen in order to study the development of new diseases and their transmission. The research can ultimately make the virus more contagious or more deadly in a lab.
According to an NIH definition, GOF includes studying and altering viruses in animals to make them transmissible to humans – and potentially more contagious and deadly.
Paul accused Fauci on May 11 of misleading Congress by saying the U.S. has never funded gain-of-function projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Kentucky Republican points to a $3.7million grant NIH gave EcoHealth Alliance in 2014. EcoHealth Alliance in turn distributed nearly $600,000 of that funding to its collaborator, the Wuhan Institute of Virology .
Paul has maintained that emails from Fauci showed that he was worried NIH funded gain-of-function research in February 2020 when the pandemic first started to emerge.
In an interview in June, Paul told Fox News: 'I think we've had a change of opinion. Everybody left-of-center was saying this was a conspiracy, no way it could have happened in the Wuhan lab. Now even Dr. Fauci is saying we should investigate it'
'But the emails paint a disturbing picture, a disturbing picture of Dr. Fauci from the very beginning worrying that he had been funding gain of function research. And he knows it to this day but hasn't admitted it.'
Paul claimed in the interview that 'there is a lot of evidence' that Fauci's views on the Wuhan lab-leak theory were compromised by a 'conflict of interest.'
'If it turns out this virus came from the Wuhan lab, which it looks like it did, that there's a great deal of culpability in that he was a big supporter of the funding,' Paul said.
'But he was also a big supporter to this day of saying that we can trust the Chinese on this, that we can trust Chinese scientists and I think that's quite naïve and really should preclude him form the position that he's in.
In June, Fauci dismissed revelations that he was warned at the start of pandemic that COVID-19 may have been 'engineered'.
Fauci seemed to play down a mass trove of damaging emails which include warnings from the start of the pandemic that the virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
He said his emails are 'ripe to be taken out of context' but he 'can't guarantee everything that is going on in the Wuhan lab'