WASHINGTON — COVID-19 killed more than 1.2 million Americans after likely leaking from a Chinese lab that was in part funded by US taxpayers, a House panel has concluded — following President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to make Beijing pay trillions in “reparations” for allowing the virus to spread.
“Four years after the onset of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis,” the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic determined in a 520-page report.
The finding wasn’t a surprise — after the FBI, the Energy Department’s National Laboratories and former federal officials like Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe reached the same conclusion.
But the report adds weight to the theory with additional analysis from former senior government officials and reiterates the fact that risky gain-of-function experiments funded by federal grants were being conducted at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China.
Trump, 78, has recently argued for a heavier hand in getting answers and accountability out of Beijing — after retiring President Biden never mentioned an interest in transparency during public portions of his three summit meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though he claimed he did so privately.
The 45th president has floated forcing China to pay $50 trillion to compensate other countries for the widespread death and economic and social consequences of the virus. Last year, he called for a “global summit on reparations.”
If held, the GOP committee report provides a road map to accountability for all the actors involved.
“First, COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, the city that happens to be the location of the China’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses,” the report says — echoing comedian Jon Stewart’s breakthrough 2021 commentary on whether the respiratory bug leaked from a lab or emerged naturally from animals.
“Next, in 2018, a year before the outbreak, EcoHealth [Alliance], in partnership with the [Wuhan Institute of Virology], in a grant application to [the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA] proposed to create a virus with SARS-CoV-2’s defining features,” the report says.
“In their application to DARPA, EcoHealth and its WIV partners stated their intent to create a SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site, which is the exact same feature that made humans susceptible to COVID-19 infection.”
That application, Project DEFUSE, was submitted in May 2018 and never funded — but is considered a “blueprint” for engineering SARS-CoV-2 by some scientific experts, current and former federal officials and members of Congress.
For example, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Robert Redfield recently noted that unfunded projects can be tested with separate grant funding — and EcoHealth Alliance President Dr. Peter Daszak initially sought to “downplay” the involvement of Wuhan researchers for DEFUSE, according to drafts and notes of the project obtained by US Right to Know.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did funnel nearly $600,000 via EcoHealth to the WIV between 2014 and 2019 for another proposal titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” a June 2023 Government Accountability Office report shows, which “included genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains.”
The House COVID subcommittee report also draws attention to the WIV having “a track record of engaging in this type of airborne viral research under low biosafety conditions.”
“At the WIV, it was known that Chinese researchers conducted this type of research under BSL-2 protocols, which do not require masking at all times and involves less protective equipment,” it adds. “In the U.S., this type of research would be conducted under BSL-3 protocols, which require stricter personal respirator use at all times and more protective equipment.”
The report argues that “the evidence supporting that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan
Seafood Market in Wuhan is tenuous” and that “key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.”
“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,” the report says.
In a separate report released Tuesday, Democrats on the panel found the lab leak theory was based on “largely circumstantial” evidence but “plausible.”
“[A]lthough EHA President Dr. Peter Daszak originally testified to the Select Subcommittee that WIV has published all SARS-like coronavirus sequences generated as a result of the EHA grant or its other work, he later acknowledged that he is unaware of whether WIV held other nonpublic viruses or genetic sequences,” it states. “That fact alone makes it difficult to rule out lab work at WIV involving SARS-CoV-2 or its progenitor virus.”
The Democrat-authored report also references a collaborator on the DEFUSE proposal who testified that even “he does not know whether WIV ultimately performed the experiments described in the application.”
“Because the full scope of WIV’s virus collection and lab work is unknown—and in light of the similarity between Project DEFUSE and SARS-CoV-2, WIV’s links to the Chinese military, and the sheer coincidence of the proximity between the outbreak and China’s premier coronavirus research lab—Select Subcommittee Democratic staff believe that a lab accident is also plausible,” their report concludes, while also characterizing zoonotic transmission from animals to humans as a “plausible” theory for COVID origins.
EcoHealth has vehemently denied that it funded dangerous gain-of-function research — contradicting sworn testimony from NIH Principal Deputy Director Dr. Lawrence Tabak — and reps for the Manhattan-based nonprofit previously told The Post its work had not “violated any terms of NIH’s grant” and “oversight of experiments adhered to NIH grant award conditions.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services disagreed and suspended EcoHealth in May from receiving all federal grants for having “likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety” and failing to submit reviews of experiments it conducted at the now-debarred Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
America’s former top infectious disease official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been a central figure in the intrigue due to the fact that he repeatedly downplayed a possible lab leak — after the agency he led, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helped fund the EcoHealth Alliance’s risky research in Wuhan.
The theory that a lab leak triggered the pandemic initially was also censored on Facebook as misinformation before gaining wide traction.
Biden said in a 2021 written statement that “[t]he world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them” and that “we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics” — but he did not make the issue a priority.
China has refused to cooperate with international investigations.
