Republican lawmakers in the House Intelligence Committee said that the CCP virus was more likely to originate from a Chinese lab than from an animal, according to their interim report published on Wednesday.
“There is overwhelming circumstantial evidence … to support a lab leak as the origination of COVID-19,” stated the report, which was led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the ranking member on the committee.
“By contrast, little circumstantial evidence has emerged to support the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China] claim that COVID-19 was a natural occurrence, having jumped from some other species to humans,” the report added.
COVID-19, a disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, first appeared in China’s central city of Wuhan in late 2019, when a cluster of cases was linked to a local wet market. More than a year later, the origins of the virus remain unknown; and yet the focus now has been on the theory that the virus was leaked from a laboratory at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
WIV is home to China’s only P4 lab, the highest level of biosafety, and it is located not far from the wet market. A State Department fact sheet released in January stated that the WIV had been conducting experiments on bat coronavirus starting in at least 2016. The institute also carried out “laboratory animal experiments” for the Chinese military since at least 2017.
More importantly, the department said it had reason to believe that “several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”
The Chinese regime has vehemently denied that the virus origin was linked to the WIV and has thrown its weight behind a natural zoonotic hypothesis—that the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal host. However, Beijing has so far failed to identify the original animal species that allegedly passed on the virus to people.
BY FRANK FANG
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