A report from the Senate says that COVID-19 likely emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, and the pandemic actually began earlier than reported.
The report says that there was a “preponderance of circumstantial evidence” surrounding the theory that COVID-19 originated in a Wuhan lab, according to the Washington Examiner.
“It is clear that the convergence of sophisticated coronavirus research, government demands for scientific breakthroughs, and biosafety problems at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] appears to have peaked in the late-summer or early-fall 2019,” investigators said via the Washington Examiner. “From June to August 2019, WIV leadership published multiple reports expressing concerns about biosafety shortcomings due to limited availability of equipment and trained personnel. Multiple PRC government medical and public health entities in Wuhan began procuring pathogen detection instruments and conducting infectious disease outbreak exercises and drills.”
The report was authored by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) along with the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
“We have to understand what happened in order to make sure this never happens again,” Marshall said in a press release. “China has had every opportunity to disprove all of the reports surrounding the origins of Covid-19, but they have not and will not.”
The full report can be accessed here and an executive summary can be accessed here.
The report specifically names the WIV as a possible point of origin of COVID-19 and claims that the virus began spreading between October 2019 and November 2019.
The report casts doubt on the competing theory that the virus came from a Wuhan wet market.
“The identified underlying biosafety issues increased the likelihood that such containment failures were not immediately recognized,” the report reads.
The report claims that there were “risky” coronavirus experiments on animals taking place in 2019 at a Wuhan lab.
The theory that COVID-19 emerged from a Wuhan lab has been gaining more and more traction as the Energy Department said in March it believed with “low confidence” that COVID-19 originated from a Wuhan Lab.
FBI Director Chris Wray also tweeted earlier this year that COVID-19 began in a lab.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray wrote on Twitter. “I will just make the argument that the Chinese government … has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work we’re doing, the work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing.”
