The Republican members on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, led by Michael McCaul, the head of the House China Task Force, issued an 83-page report this morning, entitled “The Origins of COVID-19: An Investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.” It argues that the lab synthesized the coronavirus to infect humans, leaked it, and then carried out a massive coverup, run by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the World Health Organization. McCaul summarized, “as this report lays out, a preponderance of the evidence proves that all roads lead to the WIV.” [https://gop-foreignaffairs.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/ORIGINS-OF-COVID-19-REPORT.pdf]
The evidence, all open source, is a pastiche of half-truths, misconstrued material, sloppy misunderstandings, and simply lies, making this the third of their reports over the last year, even more over-the-top than previous efforts.
The report claims that the coronavirus escaped from the WIV “sometime prior to Sept. 12, 2019,” on which date the WIV’s virus sequence database disappeared from the internet in the middle of the night. When asked, Dr. Shi Zhengli said last year that a hacking event necessitated the transfer of a database to the GenBank database of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). The Republican minority’s report has no interest in checking the NCBI, as it doesn’t serve their narrative.
The report says that funds were spent on maintenance and renovation of the air safety and waste treatment systems, even though they were only two years old. How suspicious! The WIV advertised for “security services” to “handle the ‘registration and reception of foreign personnel'” — clearly indicating they had an emergency need for extra security after an accident! The report cites satellite evidence of more people going to local hospitals in the fall of 2019. They cite a Bloomberg interview with Australian virologist Dr. Danielle Anderson, who had worked at WIV’s level 4 lab up until November 2019 – but they neglect the core of her interview in which she defended the stringent safety procedures, stated that she knew of no one who had fallen ill, and asserted that the virus was not man-made.
The report, without acknowledging that Chinese scientists and the WHO found that the Wuhan Huanan market was not the source, asserts that, since they’ve discovered the origin is not that market, the only other option is… a leak from the lab! Further: “We know gain-of-function research was happening at the WIV,” but, as is widely known, this work of Dr. Ralph Baric that they are referring to was conducted at the University of North Carolina.
In support of their assertions that the WIV was unsafe, they cite the frequently referenced (and deliberately mischaracterized) 2018 State Department cables, which were actually supportive of the lab.
The report demands that the Chinese prove that they didn’t manufacture the virus and leak it, or be held responsible. The point is not aimed to scientifically determine anything, but to mobilize legislative and political pressure. Says McCaul: “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 came to be.” There have to be sanctions on Wuhan scientists, and the Chinese bioweapon labs have to be fully transparent to the U.S. “This was the greatest coverup of all time and has caused the deaths of more than 4 million people around the world, and people must be held responsible,” he demands.
