Over the weekend, House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Michael McCaul released new details about unsafe conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
For years, Chinese scientists were juicing up and manipulating deadly viruses in unsafe conditions. McCaul is calling on Congress to officially rule out the wet market theory, which the Chinese Communist Party has used to distract from the deadly lab leak.
"While much of the public debate was initially focused on the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan as the origin of the pandemic, the preponderance of evidence now suggests that the virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Given the WIV’s demonstrated history of conducting gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses, including genetically manipulating viruses specifically to make them infectious to humans in BSL-2 labs, as well as their possession of one of the world’s largest collections of coronaviruses, it is completely plausible that one or more researcher(s) was accidentally infected and carried the virus out of the lab. The evidence outlined above, combined the cover-up conducted CCP authorities, strongly suggest the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of the current pandemic," McCaul released in a statement.
"We know gain-of-function research was happening at the WIV and we know it was being done in unsafe conditions. We also now know the head of the Chinese CDC and the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 lab publicly expressed concerns about safety at PRC labs in the summer of 2019. It is our belief the virus leaked sometime in late August or early September 2019. When they realized what happened, Chinese Communist Party officials and scientists at the WIV began frantically covering up the leak, including taking their virus database offline in the middle of the night and requesting more than $1 million for additional security," he continued.
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Evidence extensively laid out in a new report points to a lab leak in September 2019 and athletes who competed in the Military World Games in October 2019 became very ill. When they arrived in Wuhan for the games, the city was essentially locked down.
"During the games, many of the international athletes became sick with what now appear to be symptoms of COVID-19. In one interview, an athlete from Luxembourg described Wuhan as a 'ghost town,' and recalls having his temperature taken upon arriving at the city’s airport," the report states. "The service member also revealed his family members became ill as his symptoms increased, a development that is consistent with both human-to-human transmission of a viral infection and COVID-19. Similar claims about COVID-19 like symptoms have been made by athletes from Germany, France, Italy and Sweden."
As it becomes clear the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the source of the pandemic, Republican lawmakers are looking for accountability and to prevent it from happening again. Funding of the lab through the National Institutes of Health and grants given to EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak by Dr. Anthony Fauci are in the spotlight.
"Now is the time to use all of the tools the U.S. government has to continue to root out the full truth of how this virus came to be. That includes subpoenaing Peter Daszak to appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to answer the many questions his inconsistent – and in some instances outright and knowingly inaccurate – statements have raised. It also includes Congress passing legislation to sanction scientists at the WIV and CCP officials who participated in this coverup," McCaul said. "This was the greatest coverup of all time and has caused the deaths of more than four million people around world, and people must be held responsible."
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