A COMMITTEE of the United States Congress has backed the theory that a lab leak caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a report released on Monday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis said it had concluded that the coronavirus “likely emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident”.
The 520-page report, which was two years in the making, looked at the federal and state-level response to the pandemic, as well as its origins and vaccination efforts.
“This work will help the United States, and the world, predict the next pandemic, prepare for the next pandemic, protect ourselves from the next pandemic, and hopefully prevent the next pandemic,” Brad Wenstrup, the Republican chairman of the panel, said in a letter to Congress.
Among the report’s headline conclusions was that the US National Institutes of Health (NIS) funded contentious “gain-of-function” research – which enhances viruses to find ways to combat them – at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China prior to the outbreak.
Cases of COVID-19 were first identified in Wuhan – located in central China’s Hubei province – in December 2019, with the city widely believed to be where the virus first emerged.
The virus quickly spread worldwide, killing more than 7 million people and creating turmoil in the global economy as countries closed borders and ordered lockdowns.
While US federal agencies, the World Health Organization and scientists worldwide have sought to determine the origins of COVID-19, a consensus has not emerged.
Many researchers believe the virus had a zoonotic origin – spreading from animals to humans – and may have been transmitted at a wet market in Wuhan.
However, the US Department of Energy assessed with “low confidence” in an intelligence report last year that the virus most likely escaped from a lab.
The department’s finding echoed that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which said in 2021 with “moderate confidence” that the virus probably spread after a laboratory mishap.
The House committee was convinced by the lab leak theory after meeting 25 times over the past two years, conducting more than 30 transcribed interviews and reviewing more than a million pages of documents.
