Citing satellite photos, unusual funding requests and the deletion of an online database by China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology amongst other circumstantial evidence, the raniking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released a new report that firmly pointed to the Wuhan virus lab as the source of the COVID-19 outbreak.
“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. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. “Instead, as this report lays out, a preponderance of the evidence proves that all roads lead to the WIV.”
Wuhan lab report raises further questions about possible COVID-19 lab leak https://t.co/OHP4KMixgv #FoxNews @RichEdsonDC
— Mike Emanuel ?? (@MikeEmanuelFox) August 2, 2021
The report comes as President Joe Biden’s deadline for the intelligence community to review the origins of the virus outbreak that has killed 613,000 Americans and over 4 million worldwide, looms just a few weeks away according to Fox News.
The House GOP report says that the virus likely leaked from the lab “sometime in late August or early September 2019.”
Local Chinese authorities then began to frantically cover-up the accident. The WIV asked for another million dollars to enhance security for the facility and took their virus database offline in the middle of the night.
“But their coverup was too late—the virus was already spreading throughout the megacity of Wuhan. Within a month, satellite images show a significant uptick in the number of people at hospitals around the WIV with symptoms similar to COVID-19,” said the House report.
In addition, the report said that soldiers from around the world who had participated in the Military World Games in Wuhan that fall became ill with COVID-like symptoms and carried the virus back to their home countries.
The soldiers spread the virus, “creating one of the earliest super-spreader events in the world, and explaining how countries who participated in the games had reported cases as early as November 2019.”
A study completed in June suggested that a small number of COVID cases occurred in the US prior to Christmas 2019, which would likely preclude the so-called “wet-market” as the site of the original COVID outbreak.
The studied relied on an analysis of 24,000 blood samples from Americans as “federal health officials are increasingly accepting a timeline in which small numbers of COVID-19 infections may have occurred in the US before the world ever became aware of a dangerous new virus erupting in China,” said the Associated Press.
The US government began to look more seriously at the WIV as the source of the outbreak in February 2021, when rumors began to circulate of a defection by a top Chinese intelligence official who brought information about the origins of the virus.
Then came the largely ineffectual investigation by the World Health Organization, which finally sent 34 scientists to Wuhan—over a year after the first cases were reported to the rest of the world.
The subsequent 300-page report by the WHO about the origins pf the virus, relied only upon documents provided by the Chinese Communist government. No WHO official actually interviewed anyone from the WIV.
The scientific media picked up the lab-origin theme as recognized technical experts such as the MIT Technology Review and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called for independent investigations into the origins of COVID-19 in wake of the whitewash by the WHO.
A lab-leak as the origin of COVID-19 isn’t just a possibility, but “at the very least it is more like a probability—if not very close to a certainty,” John Ratcliffe, former director of national intelligence, said over the weekend.
“More than 18 months after the virus first leaked into the world, I still have not seen a single shred of scientific evidence or intelligence that the virus outbreak was a naturally occurring ‘spillover’ that jumped from an animal to a human,” said Ratcliffe
The GOP House says that they have a particular interest in talking to Peter Daszak, a WHO investigator who was responsible for helping the Chinese at the Wuhan lab secure millions in funding for COVID research from the US government.
Daszak has worked behind the scenes, trying to paint the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis as “conspiracy theories.”
“Now is the time to use all of the tools the US government has to continue to root out the full truth of how this virus came to be,” McCaul 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.”
