A House panel concluded its two-year investigation into the coronavirus pandemic and found that COVID-19 likely originated from a lab in Wuhan, China.
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The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final 520-page report on Monday, which stated: “Four years after the onset of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis.”
The report said the congressional committee learned that the virus had a biological characteristic not found in nature and data showed all COVID cases stemming from a single introduction to humans, the New York Post reported.
“By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced,” the report read.
They also pointed out that China’s SARS research lab is in Wuhan “has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels,” and that researchers there “were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.”
Reports at the onset of the pandemic linked COVID’s origin to China’s wet markets, which sell meat, fish, produce, and other animals in unsanitary conditions.
The report argues “the evidence supporting that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is tenuous” and “key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.”
It adds: “In previous outbreaks, such as SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012, infected animals were found, the earliest cases occurred in people exposed to live animals, and ancestral variants of the virus found in animals were discovered, but none of this evidence has been discovered for COVID-19.”
In a separate report released Tuesday, Democrats on the panel found the lab leak theory was based on “largely circumstantial” evidence but “plausible,” according to the Post.
The report also states social distancing and masking were not backed with scientific data, noting Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony earlier this year that those guidelines “sort of just appeared.”
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The White House’s former top doctor had repeatedly downplayed a possible lab leak after the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of which he was director, helped fund the EcoHealth Alliance’s risky research in Wuhan.
Fauci was intensely criticized over his handling of the pandemic.
The subcommittee also determined there was “no conclusive evidence” that wearing face masks protected Americans from COVID-19.
China has refused to cooperate with international investigations.