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.”
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. --->READ MORE HERE
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The GOP-led panel wrapped up a two-year investigation with criticism for lockdowns, vaccines, social distancing and masking mandates.
A House panel’s two-year investigation on COVID-19 concluded that the virus accidently leaked from a lab in China, part of a wide-ranging report that chided the U.S. pandemic response as “deeply flawed” with “rampant fraud, waste and abuse.”
Members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic said they hoped the 520-page review will “serve as a road map for Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private sector to prepare for and respond to future pandemics.”
The Republican-led panel reported that COVID-19 “most likely emerged” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, citing biological characteristics of the virus and illnesses among researchers at the facility in fall 2019, weeks before the disease began spreading globally.
The origins of the virus remain unsettled science, with many researchers still favoring the theory of animal-to-human transmission, likely at a wet market in Wuhan.
“When it came from to the nature versus lab argument, there was far more forensics on the lab side,” subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, wrote in a letter to Congress.
According to the report, the response included mitigation failures such as lockdowns, including school closures. The report also criticized masking, six-foot social distancing and vaccine mandates.
The panel praised some efforts, including the quick development of COVID-19 tests and travel restrictions that at least delayed the disease’s spread into the U.S. At the time, critics of the travel restrictions, enacted by then-President Donald Trump, said they were xenophobic. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to relevant/related stories and resources:
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