Rewind to June 2021. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tennessee, hadn’t yet taken charge of the committee. But he had questions About COVID-19which gripped the whole planet.
“For most of the pandemic, anyone who raised questions about the origins of the virus was dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist,” Greene said on the House floor.
Many people were reluctant to even believe the idea that COVID-19 could have come from a laboratory. in China In 2021.
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Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., is a doctor and Top Democrats On the House panel investigating the start of the pandemic, some Republicans promoted the lab leak theory. Yet Ruiz was careful to note that the concept is far from proven. The Energy Department and the FBI suggested a lab leak was the cause. But most U.S. intelligence agencies suspected the virus originated in nature.
“They don’t say with conviction that it was a lab leak,” Ruiz said at a July 2023 hearing. “But we’ve heard them say that from the other side. That’s a lie.”
Like Greene, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., argued in 2023 that Democrats “accuse anyone who believes there was a lab leak of being a conspiracy theorist.”
But the theory of a possible pandemic caused by a laboratory leak is no longer in the news.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is sworn in prior to testifying before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, on June 3, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The House COVID committee unearthed a message from Dr. David Morens last year — which Dr. Anthony FauciFauci was the public face of the pandemic response. He recently retired as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
Morens wrote that “Tony doesn’t want to leave his mark on the original stories.”
In a January 2023 program on Fox, Fauci declared that “the evidence points very strongly, very strongly to this being a natural jump from an animal species to the human species.”
But Fauci may have softened those views.
“I’ve been very clear and said many times that I don’t think the concept of a (lab) leak is inherently a conspiracy theory,” Fauci said before the House coronavirus committee this month. “What the conspiracy is, it’s these kind of distortions that this was a lab leak and I was parachuted into it. CIA Like Jason Bourne, he told the CIA they really shouldn’t be talking about the lab leak.”
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In 2020, Fauci cited an article from the British scientific journal Nature when talking about the causes of the pandemic. The House COVID committee is investigating communications between Fauci and the essay’s authors just before the article was published. Some Republicans Fauci has been accused of using the article to deflect criticism about a possible lab leak.
The Senate investigated the origins of the pandemic this week in a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
“We are gathered here today to examine one of the most important and debated questions of our time,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, who has long been skeptical of what the government said about how to fuel the pandemic.
Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, said of the lab leak concept, “Like the Hunter Biden laptop story, experts said this was misinformation.”
Dr. Robert Garry, dean of Tulane Medical School, co-authored a 2020 article in Nature that argued a lab leak was unlikely to have caused a pandemic.
Dr. David Morens testified in Congress about released emails between Morens and the president of an NGO that received federal funding for COVID-19 research in Wuhan, China. (House Oversight Committee)
“So you’re saying this idea came to you overnight?” asked Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
“It was new data,” Gary replied.
“Like a revelation from God? Overnight? ‘I’ve figured it out, and now I can definitely disprove it. This is amazing!’ Is that what happened?” Hawley countered.
“That’s just the scientific method,” Gary replied.
Gary believes pandemics began in nature. But he admits some science has evolved.
This is why Republican senators rebuked Gary for his article that suggested the pandemic was zoonotic in origin.
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“This is scientific misconduct and fraud,” charged Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis. “The American public does not legitimately trust scientists and health agencies, because of people like you, you bear responsibility for violating the public trust with your scientific misconduct and fraud.”
“It was not fraud,” Gary said. “We didn’t write anything in that paper that we didn’t believe to be true. The conclusions of that paper have proven to be very accurate. In fact, there has been a lot of scientific evidence since then that supports all the conclusions, everything that was written in that paper. So, there is no fraud.”
But other scientists also rebuked Gary.
Dr. Richard Ebright of Rutgers University alleged, “This is the most serious form of scientific misconduct. To publish a paper whose conclusions are false.”
Still, questions remain about what happened in Wuhan, China. This is the site of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It is close to the Wuhan wet market. This is the location that some identify as the geographic center of the pandemic.
“It’s a jump from animal to human. The most likely place is the laboratory,” said Steven Quay of Atossa Therapeutics and a former Stanford University faculty member. “Wuhan Institute of Virology. That’s where I would look.”
A worker collects a swab sample for a COVID-19 test at a mobile testing site in Beijing on Tuesday, March 15, 2022. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
However, China appears impetuous when it comes to providing data about the pandemic to Western investigators.
“The Chinese government may never fully disclose all of the information they have about the initial COVID-19 outbreak,” said Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters, Democratic-Mich., who held the hearing.
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., is advocating for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the origins of COVID. Marshall also raised the possibility of classifying COVID-19 as a biological weapon. The Kansas Republican cast it in national security terms.
Marshall asked, “What did the United States contribute to this, and how can we prevent it from happening again?”
Some senators acknowledged that the origin of Covid still remains a mystery.
“We might be at 98% or something like that. But we’re always going to be a little bit uncertain,” said Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah.
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And like much of the pandemic, this uncertainty is the only thing we know for sure.
