The panel’s investigation took two years and involved the review of millions of documents and dozens of interviews.
The congressional panel tasked with investigating the Covid-19 pandemic concluded in a report released Monday that the virus most likely originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic’s 500-page final report details its two-year investigation into the pandemic’s origins and the government response.
“The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a distrust in leadership. Trust is earned. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity will regain this trust. A future pandemic requires a whole of America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias. We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must. It can be done,” said Representative Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio), chairman of the subcommittee.
The Covid panel determined that the pandemic probably originated in a lab because of the virus’s biological characteristics, particularly the speed with which it infected humans, and the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to obstruct investigations into the virus’s origins. Furthermore, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab in Wuhan, China, conducted risky coronavirus experiments at low safety levels and had researchers come down with a virus similar to Covid-19 months before the pandemic began.
At the start of the pandemic, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci orchestrated the “proximal origin” paper published in Nature to discredit early proponents of the lab-leak theory.
The paper was published in March 2020 after Fauci and several co-authors of the paper had discussions about the plausibility of a lab leak and the purpose of the “proximal origin” paper.
In large part because of the paper, social-media platforms censored content related to the lab-leak and the theory was entirely dismissed in mainstream media as the pandemic spread around the world. Fauci and then-National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins, another top official involved in the “proximal origin” paper, later testified to the subcommittee that the lab leak is not a conspiracy theory.
To compile the report, the covid subcommittee reviewed one million pages of documents and held dozens of hearings and transcribed interviews with witnesses. It marks the most sweeping investigation into the pandemic to date and the negative long-term impacts of the measures public-health officials used to attempt to slow down the disease’s spread.
The subcommittee also discovered that the Justice Department empaneled a grand jury to investigate Covid-19 origins and it appears to have involved EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit responsible for overseeing risky, taxpayer funded coronavirus research in the Wuhan lab.
The Justice Department declined to comment. EcoHealth Alliance did not respond to a request for comment.
EcoHealth Alliance and its president Dr. Peter Daszak featured prominently in the subcommittee report because of the organization’s malfeasance surrounding the gain-of-function experiments it facilitated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
EcoHealth’s failures include the gain-of-function experiments, submitting a progress report two years late, failing to report a dangerous experiment, and misleading NIH on the locations of samples, according to the subcommittee report.
The subcommittee also accuses EcoHealth president Dr. Peter Daszak of obstruction, making false statements to Congress, and receiving internal NIH information from NIAID senior official Dr. David Morens, who used his private email to communicate with Daszak. Additionally, Morens helped Daszak avoid National Institutes of Health oversight of his research grant and edited letters Daszak sent to the NIH.
Daszak has strenuously denied that EcoHealth facilitated gain-of-function research and dismissed concerns about its apparent lack of transparency about the experiments at the Wuhan lab.
Morens seems to have evaded federal records laws by using his personal email account and received assistance from a NIH freedom of information act (FOIA) official in doing so. The FOIA official invoked her Fifth Amendment rights when the subcommittee compelled her to testify.
The subcommittee determined that Morens appears to have made false statements to the subcommittee about the actions he took to evade FOIA requests and his deletion of emails from his government account. Morens also falsely told the subcommittee that he did not assist Daszak with communications to NIH and falsely claimed he only had two email accounts, his work email and personal Gmail, according to the subcommittee report.
Many of the details of EcoHealth’s actions were previously publicized by the subcommittee in letters and hearings, resulting in the U.S. government initiating debarment proceedings against the organization and Daszak himself. EcoHealth and Daszak are currently suspended from receiving taxpayer funds, a status that could become permanent when the debarment proceedings are finalized.