The House panel investigating the government’s reaction to the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday heard testimony from influential virologists who concluded in 2020 that the pandemic began with a lab leak. been unjustly slandered.
And he aligns his beginning with thirteen words: “We don’t think any kind of lab-based situation is plausible. “
That claim, written in a widely cited paper by five prominent virologists who read the first coronavirus outbreak in March 2020, helped government officials and others dismiss the option that the pandemic began as a laboratory accident. But more than 1200 days later, and framed in a steady shift in public opinion about the origins of the virus, the scientists’ conclusion is in the midst of Tuesday’s House hearing, with Republicans alleging that the article represents a “cover-up” allegedly orchestrated through former National Institutes of Fitness officials Anthony S. Fauci and Francis S. Collins.
“This is not an attack on science. This is not an attack on peer review,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, said in a keynote address at Tuesday’s hearing. “We are examining whether clinical integrity has been ignored in favor of political expediency, to hide or diminish government appointments with the Wuhan Institute of Virology or its investment in dicy coronavirus studies for profit. “
In a staff report released Tuesday morning, Republicans focused on the authors’ initial fear that the virus leaked from a lab, prompting frantic messages among several virologists about the option that facets of the virus appear human-made, and how that position was replaced after a Feb. 1, 2020, conference call with Fauci and Collins. Medicine of Nature.
“After publication, Proximal Origin was used to downplay speculation of a lab leak and call out those who think they might be genuine conspiracy theorists. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins followed the process of reviewing and publishing the article,” the Republican Party reports. states, based on previous testimony from virologists, non-public messages, and other documents.
Fauci, Collins and the virologists have denied the GOP’s accusations as baseless and politically motivated, saying they updated their positions through reading the virus, and two of the paper’s authors defended their paintings before the panel on Tuesday.
“Let me say categorically that those allegations are absurd and false,” Kristian Andersen, a scientist at Scripps Research and co-author of the paper, said in ready comments. “The conclusions established in Proximal Origin were based on clinical knowledge and analyses through a team of foreign scientists with extensive experience in reading the emergence and evolution of viruses. . . None of these paintings influenced through Dr. Fauci. “
Virologists and evolutionary biologists have argued that the virus most likely spread to humans from a Wuhan market where wild animals were sold and slaughtered, yielding peer-reviewed findings.
Democrats released their own report on Tuesday, also building on previous testimony, existing documents and newly released messages exchanged between the authors when the document was drafted in 2020. That review found that “there is no cover-up of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. “and no suppression of the lab leak theory through Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins,” according to the Democrats’ report.
“While the facts remain unknown, we let our communities of experts continue to work while we, as lawmakers, focus on policies to help you save the next pandemic and save lives in the long run,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif. ) , the most sensible Democrat on the panel, said in his opening remarks. “But instead of doing that, here we are: interviewing researchers who wrote a paper 3 years ago so my colleagues can push their partisan narrative and denigrate our nation’s public health officials and facilities in the works. “
A declassified government intelligence report released last month also said U. S. intelligence officials were not in the business of the government. The U. S. Department of Defense was aware of a lab leak that could have caused the pandemic, adding that officials had no evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese lab where researchers studied coronaviruses, had SARS. -CoV-2 or a “close parent” on your property before the pandemic.
“All agencies continue to assess that an origin associated with the herbs and the laboratory remain credible hypotheses of the first human infection,” the intelligence report concluded, acknowledging that the Wuhan laboratory suffered from protective deficiencies such as aging and inadequate equipment. Widespread protection considerations declared in the past in the country’s laboratories that may be the source of potential outbreaks.
Tuesday’s hearing, which preceded Republicans issuing a subpoena to force Andersen to hand over personal communications between scientists, represents a new front in a years-long debate that has torn apart the clinical network, amplified tensions between China and the United States and tangled media outlets that have had to review and update beyond coverage.
The hearing also sparked bitter recriminations from the paper’s authors, who say they have been wrongly and persistently slandered.
“This is a black day for science. This is nothing more than a McCarthy-era show trial,” Edward Holmes, an Australian virologist who co-authored the paper, wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “We have lived through 3. 5 years of harassment and lies for the obvious ‘crime’ of writing a clinical article. “
Holmes said he declined Republicans’ invitation to testify. “I am satisfied to tell my story, but with this pitiful research simulation,” he wrote.
Public opinion has shifted since the early days of the pandemic, when a Pew Research poll in March 2020 found that 29% of Americans believe the virus came from a lab. According to a March 2023 Quinnipiac University ballot, nearly two-thirds of Americans liked the lab leak theory to an herbal theory, albeit with significant partisan division; About 87 percent of Republicans favored the lab leak theory, with 42 percent of Democrats, according to Quinnipiac.
The GOP-led House panel has built its own case that the coronavirus leaked from a lab, holding several hearings and a roundtable with witnesses sympathetic to the theory.
“Needless to say, this is coming from the lab,” Johns Hopkins transplant surgeon Marty Makary told the panel in March.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif. ) and other Republican leaders touted the party’s investigation and urged the Biden administration to provide more information about the origin of the virus.
“It’s also very good for us to know, to look back and see the mistakes that were made, so that those mistakes never happen again in a pandemic over the long term,” McCarthy said at a news convention last month.
Fauci told the Post in an interview last year that he was wary of Republicans taking over Congress and launching such investigations.
“It’s the Benghazi hearings again,” Fauci said at the time, referring to GOP-led investigations into Hillary Clinton’s State Department leadership and the 2012 attacks on U. S. compounds in Libya. These critics uncovered no new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton, yet they have become a staple of the conservative media.