By: Jerry Dunleavy
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/author/jerry-dunleavy
House Intelligence Committee Republicans released a report on the coronavirus pandemic on Wednesday and pointed the finger directly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, arguing there is “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” supporting the hypothesis COVID-19 originated in the lab.
Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus. Both administrations cast doubt on the manner in which a joint study from China and the World Health Organization was conducted earlier this year. Though the WHO-China report said a jump from animals to humans was most likely, numerous Trump officials have pointed to an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab as a highly plausible, or the most likely, origin for the pandemic.
Led by Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the 21-page Republican report, In Focus: COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laid out what the congressmen saw as the case for considering a leak from a Wuhan lab.
It assessed that the Wuhan lab was secretly working with the Chinese military and conducting gain-of-function research and pointed to the possibility that U.S. funding may have ended up helping the lab with those experiments.
>>“The threads of circumstantial information suggest the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and resulting COVID-19 pandemic could have been the result of an accidental leak from the WIV, particularly given the absence of credible information that supports a zoonotic transmission,” the House GOP report concluded. “Unfortunately, Beijing has hindered the conduct of a full, credible investigation. There is overwhelming circumstantial evidence, however, to support a lab leak as the origination of COVID-19, while there is no substantive evidence supporting the natural zoonosis hypothesis.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/gop-house-intel-overwhelming-circumstantial-evidence-wuhan-lab-covid-origin