WASHINGTON – A House panel has concluded that COVID-19 killed more than 1.2 million Americans after it leaked from a Chinese laboratory that was partially funded by US taxpayers – elected After President Donald Trump Beijing proposes to pay trillions in “compensation” To allow the virus to spread.
“Four years after the start of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis,” the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic said. 520 page report,
This discovery was not a surprise – later FBIDepartment of Energy national laboratories and former federal officials like Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe Reached the same conclusion.
But the report bolsters the theory with additional analysis from former senior government officials and reiterates the fact that risky for-profit experiments funded by federal grants were being conducted at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China.
Trump, 78, has recently argued for working harder to get answers and accountability from Beijing — after retiring President Biden never showed transparency during the public parts of his three summit meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Did not mention interest, although he Claimed he did it in private,
The 45th president has pressed China to pay $50 trillion to compensate other countries for the widespread deaths and economic and social consequences caused by the virus. Last year, he called for a “global summit on reparations”.
The GOP committee report provides a road map to accountability for all actors involved.
“First, COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, the city that is home to China’s leading research laboratory for SARS-like viruses,” the report said. Jon Stewart’s Success 2021 Commentary On whether the respiratory bug leaked from a laboratory 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 (the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA), proposed creating a virus Placed with the defining characteristics of SARS-CoV-2,” the report says.
“In their application to DARPA, EcoHealth and its WIV Partners They reportedly intended to create a SARS-like virus with a furin cleavage site, which is exactly the feature that has made humans susceptible to COVID-19 infection.” WIV stands for Wuhan Institute of Virology.
that application, Project DiffusePresented in May 2018 and never funded – but it is considered a “blueprint” for engineering SARS-CoV-2 by some scientific experts, current and former federal officials, and members of Congress.
For example, Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recently noted Non-funded projects can be tested with separate grant funding – and Dr. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, initially said “To humiliateThe involvement of Wuhan researchers for DEFUSE, according to project drafts and notes obtained by US Right to Know.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded WIV approximately $600,000 through EcoHealth between 2014 and 2019 for another proposal titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” in June 2023. Government Accountability Office Report Shows, which “involved genetic experiments to combine naturally occurring bat coronaviruses with SARS and MERS viruses, resulting in the creation of hybridized (also known as chimeric) coronavirus strains. “
The House COVID subcommittee report also draws attention to WIV, which “has a track record of engaging in this type of airborne viral research under reduced biosafety conditions.”
“At 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 involve less protective equipment,” it adds. “In the US, this type of research would be conducted under BSL-3 protocols, which require the use of strict personal respirators and more protective equipment at all times.”
The report argues that “there is evidence to support that COVID-19 came from an animal in Huanan
The seafood market in Wuhan is weak” and “key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from 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 the discovery of ancestral variants of the virus found in animals Investigations were done, but no evidence of any of this was found. “Discovered for COVID-19,” the report said.
In a separate report Released Tuesday, Democrats on the panel found that the lab leak theory was based on “largely circumstantial” evidence, but was “plausible.”
“(a) Although 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 EHA grants or its other work, he later acknowledged “They are not aware of whether WIV contains other non-publicized viruses or genetic sequences,” it said. Makes it difficult to dismiss.”
The report, written by Democrats, also references an aide on the DEFUSE proposal who testified that “he does not even know whether WIV ultimately performed the experiments described in the application.”
“Because the full scope of WIV’s virus collection and laboratory work is unknown – and in light of the similarities between Project DEFUSE and SARS-CoV-2, WIV’s connection to the Chinese military, and the sheer coincidence of proximity between the outbreak and China’s major coronavirus Research Laboratory – Select Subcommittee Democratic staff “believes that a laboratory accident is also plausible,” their report concludes, also citing zoonotic transmission from animals to humans as a “plausible” theory. Has been marked in. Origin of Covid.
EcoHealth vehemently denies that it has funded dangerous gain-of-function research – contradict sworn testimony Dr. Lawrence Tabak — NIH’s principal deputy director — and representatives of the Manhattan-based nonprofit previously told The Post that its work “did not violate any of the NIH grant terms” and “in accordance with NIH grant award terms.” Monitoring the experiments that followed.”
The US Department of Health and Human Services disagreed and Suspended EcoHealth was barred from receiving all federal grants in May for “potentially violating NIH protocols regarding biosafety” and failing to submit a review of the experiments currently being conducted.Wuhan Institute of Virology banned,
Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s former top infectious disease official, has been a central figure in the conspiracy due to the fact that he Potential laboratory leak repeatedly underestimated – The agency he led, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, helped finance EcoHealth Alliance’s risky research in Wuhan.
The theory that a lab leak initially caused the pandemic was censored as misinformation on Facebook before it gained widespread popularity.
Biden said in a written statement in 2021 that “The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them” and that “to prevent further pandemics we must all better understand how COVID-19 came about” – but he did not prioritize the issue.
China has refused to cooperate with the international investigation.
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