The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the findings of its two-year investigation into the origins of COVID-19 on Monday, concluding that the virus “most likely” originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The report also sharply criticized the Biden administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and left-wing organizations for their responses to the pandemic.
The subcommittee’s 520-page report, which includes nine Republicans and seven Democrats, suggests that COVID-19 was leaked from a Chinese laboratory due to several factors. Among them is the virus’ “biological characteristic,” which the report claims is not typically found in nature. The subcommittee also highlighted that all COVID-19 cases seem to trace back to a single human transmission, diverging from the multiple “spillover events” observed in other pandemics.
Wuhan, home to China’s top Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) research lab, has been central to the investigation. The report notes that the laboratory has a history of conducting risky “gain-of-function” research, which involves making pathogens more transmissible in order to study them, albeit under unsafe biosafety conditions. The subcommittee further points to evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019—months before the virus was officially detected at a nearby market.
