Republican Rep accuses China of the ‘worst cover-up in human history’
Republican Texas Rep. Mike McCaul believes it’s ‘more likely than not’ COVID came from the Wuhan lab and has accused China of the ‘worst cover-up in human history’.
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McCaul told CNN’s State of the Union that President Biden’s investigation was ‘long overdue’ but fears it may turn up nothing because scientists have ‘destroyed everything at the lab.
He also called for the US to stop buying medical products from China as members of both the Democrats and Republicans called for a congressional investigation into the origins of COVID.
‘If we can pull these chains out of China, it will hurt them economically,’ McCaul said. ‘And that would be very punitive in nature.’ The Senate has already adopted a measure from Republican Joni Ernst that would prohibit U.S. funding from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb also said Sunday that accidental lab leaks ‘happen all the time’.
‘Even here in the United States, we’ve had mishaps, and in China, the last six known outbreaks of SARS-1 have been out of labs, including the last known outbreak, which was a pretty extensive outbreak that China initially wouldn’t disclose that it came out of a lab, ‘ he told CBS’ Face the Nation.
Matthew Pottinger, President Donald Trump’s former deputy national security adviser who said in January 2020 that the virus leak was the most likely explanation, insisted that it is key for the US to get answers.
‘It could have emerged from a laboratory. It could have emerged from nature,’ he said on NBC’s Meet the Press’ ‘Both of those are valid, neither of them is supported by concrete evidence, but there’s, there’s a growing amount of circumstantial evidence, in particular, supporting the idea that this may have leaked from the laboratory.’
Gottlieb, who served as then-President Trump’s FDA commission from 2017 until 2019, also told CBS News that evidence that the virus came from the lab is expanding.
‘And a side of the ledger that suggests that this could have come from a zoonotic source, come out of nature, really hasn’t budged.’
Gottlieb said that there is enough evidence to rule out the earlier theory that coronavirus originated from a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan.
Gottlieb added: ‘And if anything, you can argue that that side of the ledger has contracted because we’ve done an exhaustive search for the so-called intermediate host, the animal that could have been exposed to this virus before it spread to humans.
‘We have not found such an animal.’
Once dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory promoted by the Trump administration, mainstream media has reversed itself in recent weeks as circumstantial evidence has surfaced indicating that it is possible coronavirus accidentally leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that lab technicians at the facility mysteriously fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 as far back as November 2019 – just weeks before the virus began to spread in earnest in China.
The Chinese government did not officially report its first case of coronavirus until December 2019.
In the initial stages of the pandemic, it was speculated that the virus may have been spread from animals sold at a local ‘wet market’ in Wuhan.
But Gottlieb told CBS News on SUnday that this theory has now been ‘fully disproven.’
He said that China holds the key to understanding the origins of the virus. The government could provide evidence like blood samples of the lab technicians who fell ill as well as original source strains and early samples of the virus.
‘If we assess that there is a probability or a possibility that this came out of a lab, it’s going to affect how we respond to this,’ he said.
‘We’re going to need to focus on trying to get better controls in this sort of high-risk research going forward and get better controls over these BSL-4, these high security labs that conduct this research.’
‘BSL-4’ is the highest biosafety level of containment for a laboratory.
Gottlieb said that lab leaks aren’t rare and that ‘mishaps’ have occurred – even in the United States.
He said getting to the bottom of what caused the pandemic is important since ‘we need to also look at public health through the lens of national security.’
Video: Biden orders review of Covid-19 origins as lab leak theory debated (France 24)
‘This was an asymmetric harm to the United States,’ Gottlieb said.
‘COVID hurt the U.S. a lot more than it hurt many other countries.’
The former FDA commissioner warns the public may not ever know how the virus spread.
‘We may never really determine with precision whether or not this came out of a lab,’ he said.
‘I think what we’re likely to end up with is an assessment, a probability, unless we get very lucky and we either find the intermediate host, we find a colony of civet cats or pangolins where this is epidemic and it could have first spilled over into humans, or we have a whistleblower in China or regime change, which we’re not going to have.
‘I don’t know that we’re going to find out with certainty that this came out of a lab.’
Biden orders ‘unexamined evidence’ that could show coronavirus leaked from China lab to be crunched by supercomputers at 17 elite research facilities
President Joe Biden has ordered the government’s leading research laboratories to join the search for the true origins of the COVID-19 pandemic by sifting through a massive trove of previously unexamined data, according to new reports.
Biden on Wednesday ordered the 17 National Labs run by the Department of Energy to assist the intelligence community in a 90-day sprint to examine whether the virus leaked from a lab in China.
The labs have been tapped ‘because of their ability to crunch massive amounts of data’ with their advanced supercomputers, a White House official told CNN.
The government is not revealing exactly what kind of data is being submitted for analysis, but experts say it is likely previously gathered intelligence such as signal intercepts or biological evidence.
Intelligence agencies regularly collect more raw data than their analysts are able to effectively pore through, and the application of advanced algorithms to seek patterns in the massive data set could offer new breakthroughs.
‘We want the science to be a big part of this,’ the White House official told CNN. ‘We are going to use the full resources of our intelligence and scientific community to try to get to the bottom of this.’
Biden is also urging U.S. intelligence agencies and those of allies to hunt for new information that could shed light on whether China covered up a lab leak.
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, said the Biden administration’s response was ‘better late than never, but far from adequate.’
‘Our intelligence community has been looking at this now for 15 months. They’ve done good work on it, but in the end the answer lies in the hands of Chinese communists, not people working for American intelligence agencies,’ he told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
Cotton said that officials in Beijing have not been forthcoming about how the pandemic began. ‘We should be insisting that they come clean, that they provide us a clear and unvarnished look at what was happening in the Wuhan labs,’ he said.
Circumstantial evidence has long raised questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers were known to be conducting experiments on bat coronavirus strains similar to the one responsible for COVID-19.
China insisted early and often that the virus did not leak from the lab, claiming that crossover to humans must have occurred at a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan that sold live animals.
Perhaps driven by animosity for Donald Trump, who embraced the lab leak theory early on, the mainstream U.S. media and academics heaped scorn on the possibility, calling it an unhinged conspiracy theory.
But new evidence, including reports of three workers at the Wuhan lab who fell seriously ill with COVID-like symptoms in November 2019, has forced a sober reassessment among doubters.
Frustration with China increased this week after Beijing said that it would not participate in any further investigations by the World Health Organization.
Biden rebuked China in his announcement of the new intelligence review, calling on allies to help ‘press China to participate in a full, transparent, evidence-based international investigation and to provide access to all relevant data and evidence.’
UK intelligence agencies are assisting in Biden’s new 90-day intelligence review, a senior Whitehall security source told The Telegraph.
The source told the publication: ‘We are contributing what intelligence we have on Wuhan, as well as offering to help the American to corroborate and analyze any intelligence they have that we can assist with.’
British intelligence agencies have generally been skeptical of the lab leak theory, while Australia’s spies have been more open to it.
While Britain and Australia already share intelligence with the U.S. as part of the Five Eyes partnership, Biden’s new probe could prod them to redouble their focus on sharing evidence related to a possible lab leak.
Meanwhile, House Republican Whip Steve Scalise and more than 200 of his GOP colleagues have also called for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to direct her Democrat-led committees to investigate China’s complicity in causing the COVID pandemic.
In a letter to the Democratic House Speaker, the Republicans said there is ‘mounting evidence the pandemic started in a Chinese lab’ and the Chinese Communist Party ‘covered it up’.
‘If that is the case, the CCP is responsible for the deaths of almost 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide. These questions about the CCP’s liability are not a diversion, as you falsely claimed,’ the letter reads.
Source: Thanks msn.com