‘This was a failure of monumental proportions and it is imperative that we uncover the truth so we can set up future safeguards …’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) A new interim congressional report exploring the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus prominently examines information about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its likely role.
While the report confirms many news reports from the past several months, it also highlights the nexus between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese military.
The American news media has consistently downplayed any speculation about the BSL-4 lab’s activities and has often labeled the idea that the pandemic virus came from the lab as a conspiracy theory.
Yet, the 50-page report, a precursor to an impending full report, notes how the media has “been quick to dismiss these claims.”
BSL-4 labs are authorized to perform research on easily transmitted pathogens which can cause fatal diseases. The WIV lab was handling coronavirus-infected bats that were captured from other parts of China and transported to the facility for experiments.
How is this known despite China’s great wall of secrecy? Because the U.S. National Institutes for Health specifically funded such activities.
The congressional report states that China has a history of safety issues at its top labs, including the accidental release of the SARS virus in 2004 that killed one person and infected seven others.
With respect to the Wuhan lab, investigators determined that the Chinese Communist Party had “repeatedly” and “intentionally” violated the 2005 International Health Regulations that were put in place after China’s failed response to the 2004 outbreak.
The Wuhan lab was constructed under the guidance of the French government. But the French military and intelligence services became deeply concerned about the communist country’s drift toward “dual-use” function.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] was suspected of having a biological warfare program, and the military and intelligence services were worried that the dual-use technology required to build a BSL-4 lab could be used misused by the PRC government,” the report said.
The report further explains that as of 2017, Wuhan lab researchers had collected more than 300 unique bat coronavirus sequences, and that “gain of function” was an ongoing objective.
“Gain-of-function research is research that has ‘the potential to enhance the pathogenicity or transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens,’” the report said.
The Wuhan lab was also run by CCP leaders and it was taken over by a senior bioweapons expert in the People’s Liberation Army earlier this year.
“In a possible fulfillment of the concerns raised by the French defense and intelligence services,” the report states, the lab’s top CCP civilian apparatchik was “succeeded by Major General Chen Wei, the PRC’s top biowarfare expert.”
Monday’s congressional report was spearheaded by Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. It purports to be the culmination of months of detailed research from open-source materials and information assessed from the U.S. and French intelligence communities.
“After months of investigating, it’s become crystal clear the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up of the coronavirus, especially in the early days of the outbreak, played a significant role in turning what could have been a local epidemic into a global pandemic,” said McCaul.
“This was a failure of monumental proportions and it is imperative that we uncover the truth so we can set up future safeguards to prevent this from happening yet again,” he said.