Republican investigation reportedly ‘proves’ COVID leaked from Wuhan lab
COVID-19 leaked from the controversial Wuhan lab sometime before Sept. 12, 2019 — with China’s Communist Party keeping the deadly virus under wraps in the “greatest coverup of all time,” according to a damning Republican investigation into the origins released Monday.
The report shows “a preponderance of the evidence proves that all roads lead” to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the bat-research lab already eyed as a source for the pandemic, according to Rep. Michael McCaul.
“It is our belief the virus leaked sometime in late August or early September 2019,” said McCaul, the lead Republican in the House Foreign Affairs Committee who released the report.
“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,” McCaul said.
“But their coverup was too late – the virus was already spreading throughout the megacity of Wuhan,” he said of the pandemic that as of Monday has killed at least 4,225,602 people globally.
The investigation also revealed a previously unknown request in July 2019 for a $1.5 million overhaul of a hazardous waste treatment system for the facility, even though it was less than two years old.
It included requests for maintenance on “environmental air disinfection system” and “hazardous waste treatment system” – which would indicate concerns about how these systems meant to prevent lab leaks were functioning, the report alleges.
The report cites satellite and geo-mapping intelligence that showed hospitals around the lab getting unusually busy from September — with a rush for online searches of symptoms now linked to the pandemic.
The report also accuses Peter Daszak of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance, as well as the Wuhan lab’s “bat woman” lead scientist Shi Zhengli, of lying about the origins and dismissing the lab-leak theory as a crackpot conspiracy.
Daszak should be subpoenaed 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,” McCaul said.
The report also calls on Congress to “sanction scientists at the WIV and CCP officials who participated in this coverup.”
“This was the greatest coverup of all time and has caused the deaths of more than four million people around world, and people must be held responsible,” McCaul said.
The 84-page report lays out a trove of evidence the Republicans say proves it’s time to “completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak.”
Key allegations include:
THE WUHAN LAB’S EARLIER WORK
The report cited “ample evidence” that the lab’s scientists — aided by US experts and Chinese and US government funds — were working to modify coronaviruses to infect humans and such manipulation could be hidden.
“It is self-evident that Shi and her colleagues, with funding and support from Daszak, were actively genetically manipulating coronaviruses and testing them against human immune systems in 2018 and 2019, before the beginning of the pandemic,” the report alleges.
The Republican document also shot down a key defense for those who argue against the lab-leak theory by saying there is no proof that the virus was modified by humans.
“Researchers at the WIV were … able to successfully modify coronaviruses without leaving a trace as early as 2016,” McCaul insisted, citing previous research papers.
“Therefore it is no longer appropriate for anyone to dismiss the notion this virus could have been genetically modified before it leaked from the WIV,” he said.
There were also “significant concerns about the lax safety protocols” at the lab, with US State Department officials warning in 2018 about “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
MAJOR REPAIRS REQUESTED MONTHS EARLIER
In July 2019 — at most two months before Republicans believe the virus initially leaked — the lab requested a $1.5 million overhaul of its “environmental air disinfection system” and “hazardous waste treatment system,” the report claims.
“Such a significant renovation so soon after the facility began operation appears unusual,” the report says of the two-year-old lab.
The needed repairs “raise questions about how well these systems were functioning in the months prior to the outbreak of COVID-19,” the report states.
In a hypothesis of how the virus leaked, the report suggests that faulty central air conditioning “likely resulted in lower than ideal air circulation and enabling viral particles to remain suspended in the air longer.”
UNUSUAL ACTIVITY ON SEPT. 12, 2019
The report concludes that the virus escaped “sometime prior to September 12, 2019” — the day that urgent inspections were called for the lab and its viral sequence database disappeared from the internet in the middle of the night.
“The database contained more than 22,000 entries consisting of sample and pathogen data collected from bats and mice,” the report claims.
“The database contained key information about each sample, including what type of animal it was collected from, where it was collected, whether the virus was successfully isolated, the type of virus collected, and its similarity to other known viruses.”
Yet, “Shi has given several conflicting answers” about the database outage — including blaming outrage at staff after the contagion spread worldwide, even though it had been offline months before, the report says.
Later that evening, the institute published an announcement for bids for “security services” at the lab “to include gatekeepers, guards, video surveillance, security patrols, and people to handle the ‘registration and reception of foreign personnel,’” according to the report.
PEOPLE’S LIBERATION ARMY TAKE CONTROL
The report says PLA Major General Chen Wei, an expert in biology and chemical weapon defenses, was deployed to take control of the Wuhan lab in January 2020 — if not the end of 2019.
That timing demonstrates the Chinese Communist Party “was concerned about the activity happening there as news of the virus was spreading,” the Republican report argues.
Worse, if Wei had been there in late 2019, as intelligence suggests, “it would mean the CCP knew about the virus earlier, and that the outbreak began earlier” than China has admitted, the report argues.
“This raises the obvious question of why Shi … would lie about military researchers working with the WIV,” the report says, suggesting that “her denial and the scrubbing of the website appear to be obvious attempts to obfuscate the PLA’s involvement with the WIV.”
REPORTS OF COVID-LIKE SICKNESS AROUND THE LAB
Satellite imagery of Wuhan in September and October that year showed a significant increase in hospital visits and internet searches for pneumonia-like symptoms now known to be COVID, the report says.
The analysis found that five out of the six hospitals closest to the lab “had the highest relative daily volume of cars in the parking lot in September and October 2019, before the first reported cases of COVID-19,” the report notes.
“This peak corresponded with an increase in searches for ‘cough’ and ‘diarrhea’ in Wuhan on Baidu, a Chinese search engine,” it said, suggesting that “a virus with similar symptoms as COVID-19 was circulating in Wuhan in September and October.”
MILITARY WORLD GAMES AS A SUPER-SPREADER
The Military World Games went ahead that October and some athletes “carried the virus back to their home countries – creating one of the earliest super spreader events in the world,” McCaul said.
The Republican researchers hypothesized that the decision to continue with the event — with 9,308 athletes from 109 countries and 236,000 volunteers — was “to prevent national embarrassment.”
“Since COVID-19 can infect humans without causing symptoms, an untold number of athletes and volunteers become infected, but are asymptomatic and unaware they are infectious,” that hypothesis suggests.
Many athletes reported getting sick with COVID-like symptoms at the games — while others marveled at how the large city was a “ghost town,” the report notes.
“This was a city of 15 million people that was in lockdown,” a member of the Canadian Armed Force told Canada’s The Financial Post of the event months before the new coronavirus was officially reported.
The athlete said he got “very sick 12 days after we arrived, with fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia” — and that “60 Canadian athletes on the flight [home] were put in isolation” with symptoms now known to be typical for COVID.
The report suggests that “by the time the world was alerted to the virus spreading in Wuhan, it had already begun to spread around the world.”
Only in December, “as cases begin to overload local hospitals,” did China finally confirm the mysterious new illness because “it became impossible to hide the outbreak,” the report suggests.
DASZAK HELPS IN COVERUP
The Republican report leveled serious allegations at Daszak, saying he was “heavily involved in the gain-of-function research” at the lab — and then helped China float the lab-leak theory as a nonsense conspiracy.
“We have uncovered strong evidence that suggests Peter Daszak is the public face of a CCP disinformation campaign designed to suppress public discussion about a potential lab leak,” the Republican report alleges.
It also notes that Daszak was the only US representative on the World Health Organization’s origins fact-finding mission to China that deflected attention away from likely ties to the lab.
“The United States put forth a list of experts to be considered, none of whom were chosen. Daszak was not on that list but was nevertheless selected and approved by the CCP,” the report states.
The WHO report then included “multiple examples of CCP disinformation that have been repeated by Daszak,” the Republicans allege.
The WHO also noted his key role in a letter in the Lancet signed by scientists dismissing the lab-leak theory, which his name was initially hidden from to cover up the ties, according to the report.
WUHAN LAB WAS THE SOURCE, REPORT CONCLUDES
“The evidence … combined [with] the cover-up conducted CCP authorities, strongly suggest the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the current pandemic,” the report insists.
President Biden in May ordered US intelligence agencies to accelerate their hunt for the origins of the virus and report back in 90 days. It is expected by Aug. 24.
A source familiar with current intelligence assessments told Reuters that the intelligence community has not reached a firm conclusion on whether the virus leaked from the lab.
With Post wires
