A report by a group of Republican congressmen has pinned the blame for the coronavirus pandemic on a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, several months before the country first reported it.
The members of the House of Representatives released details of an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus yesterday, concluding that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology at some point before September 12, 2019.
Describing the leak as the “greatest cover-up of all time”, the report claimed they had found that “a preponderance of the evidence proves that all roads lead to the Wuhan lab”.
“It is our belief the virus leaked sometime in late August or early September 2019,” Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House foreign affairs committee, said. “When they realised what happened, Chinese Communist Party officials and scientists at the [Wuhan lab] began frantically covering up the leak, including taking their virus database offline in the middle of the night and requesting more than $1 million for additional security,” he said.
Senior Republicans have long contended that China has tried to evade responsibility for the outbreak, and have dismissed claims that the virus originated outside a lab. Donald Trump, the former president, consistently described Covid-19 as the “China virus”.
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In May President Biden threw open the possibility that the coronavirus pandemic began after a leak at the Wuhan lab, saying that it was now one of two scenarios being assessed.
In a statement, Biden said that three US intelligence analyses regarded the cause of the outbreak to be either human contact with an infected animal, or a “laboratory accident”, and ordered an inquiry that is due to conclude next month.
The Republican congressmen have not waited for the result of the White House’s investigation. McCaul’s inquiry revealed a previously unknown request in July 2019 for a $1.5 million overhaul of a hazardous waste treatment system for the Wuhan facility, even though it was less than two years old. It included requests for maintenance on “environmental air disinfection system” and “hazardous waste treatment system” – the congressmen say that these systems could have been crucial to preventing leaks.
“Such a significant renovation so soon after the facility began operation appears unusual,” the report said. It asked “how well these systems were functioning prior to the outbreak of Covid-19”. China insists that the virus was not accidentally released by the lab.
The committee is seeking to subpoena a British scientist, Peter Daszak, as part of its investigation. He has “many questions” to answer, they say. He has a close working relationship with Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan scientist nicknamed “Bat Woman” over her work with bats and communicable viruses.
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Daszak signed a letter to The Lancet in February last year which “strongly condemned conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. He is also a member of the World Health Organisation’s inquiry into the origins of the virus.
As the pandemic recedes in the West, millions of Chinese are again being confined to their homes after the largest outbreak reached Wuhan, the city where the pandemic began.
In the city of Zhuzhou, Hunan, more than 1.2 million residents were placed under strict lockdown for the next three days. Zhangjiajie, a tourist city in Hunan that was featured in the film Avatar, locked down all 1.5 million residents last week and asked anyone who had travelled from Nanjing to come forward.
China yesterday reported 55 new community infections, with the variant confirmed in 20 cities and a dozen provinces — although total cases remain low at 360 in the past two weeks.