WASHINGTON — The COVID-19 pandemic may have originated with two separate leaks at Chinese labs doing risky “gain of function” research, a Republican senator stated Monday.
A report released by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) raises the prospect that millions of lives worldwide could have been saved — including those of more than 1 million Americans — if not for an alleged “coverup” by the Chinese government while a much-theorized initial outbreak simmered.
“This report concludes most likely this was two leaks — the possibility of a lab leak in the September-October [2019] timeframe, even as early as July or August,” the medical doctor turned senator told a small group of journalists ahead of the release of the 301-page document.
“We’ve concluded that they [China] started vaccine development in November 2019. And then another lab leak seems to be most sensible explanation,” he said. “There are key data points that are being held back that could help us prove that.”
Dr. Robert Kadlec, the cofounder of the Operation Warp Speed program that rapidly developed US COVID-19 vaccines, drafted the report titled “Muddy Waters: The Origins of COVID-19 Report” with about a dozen staffers and additional outside consultants.
The theory that there were two lab leaks, with the first one’s effect going unrecognized by the global community as the Chinese government raced ahead with early vaccine development, is unproven and Marshall says he welcomes debate and the exploration of other possibilities.
The theory rests on scientific conjecture about previously reported details — including an assessment of the amount of work that would have had to predate a Feb. 24, 2020, vaccine patent filed by Dr. Zhou Yusen, a Chinese military scientist who later died under mysterious circumstances. Investigators concluded that the vaccine development would have had to start in November 2019, using the Operation Warp Speed timeframe as a benchmark.
A pre-November series of additional events adds weight to the theory, Marshall said, including the mysterious death of 11 Iranian athletes, publicly reported in 2020. Some of the athletes reportedly attended the Olympics-style World Military Games in held Wuhan, China, in October 2019.
There are additional scientific clues, according to the report.
“Epidemiological and genetic molecular analyses of the early published circulating Wuhan SARSCoV-2 strains supported the possibility of two spillover events two or more weeks apart,” the report says.
“This assessment was made based on minor genetic differences in early circulating strains suggesting that two lineages of the same virus may have emerged simultaneously and progressed on different paths or sequentially separated by some period of time. One lineage showing more mutations than the other implying it had been circulated longer than the other or had potentially passed through more individuals.”
The document goes on: “A recently published study analyzed data from existing WHO global influenza surveillance networks early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis could identify outliers in influenza-negative influenza-like illness (ILI) that served as potential early indicator of COVID-19 community
transmission.”
The Kadlec-led team reported “[a] noticeable increase of Wuhan adult ILI cases during week 46 (November 11-17, 2019) corresponded to negative influenza testing that same week. This occurrence is similar to the epidemiological outlier identified in the published study. It occurs approximately 13 weeks before the recorded surge of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in late January, early February 2020.”
Further raising the suspicions of investigators, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting risky US-funded gain of function research on coronaviruses, deleted an online database of virus samples on Sept. 12, 2019, which Marshall said likely would have shown “cousins” of COVID-19 if it was indeed from nature.
“There are a lot of events around this timeline, then it gets a little quiet, and then — boom, something else happens,” Marshall said.
But Marshall readily admits that there may be alternative explanations for the outbreak, which Chinese authorities first publicly acknowledged on Dec. 31, 2019.
Pressed by The Post on whether it was possible the vaccine patent was quickly filed because Chinese scientists were aware of COVID-19 in a lab without it necessarily leaking, the senator said, “I’m inviting that [possibility]. I think that’s the whole purpose of science, to shoot down those theories.”
Marshall said he hopes the report will build momentum to establish a 9/11 Commission-style investigation of the origins of the virus to understand the reason for the devastating pandemic and to prevent a recurrence.
“I don’t think anyone can conclude that this is a ‘get [Dr. Anthony] Fauci’ paper,” said Marshall, who has clashed with the former top US infectious disease expert at hearings focused on US funding for the Wuhan lab that modified viruses to make them more contagious.
Marshall said that he believes Democratic colleagues are warming to an investigation of the pandemic’s origins and “I’ll be curious as to how the White House responds.”
The senator also ridiculed an effort by what he called the “gain of function mafia” to push a theory that raccoon dogs farmed for their fur caused the pandemic, saying they would have been shipped around China — leading to outbreaks in geographically distinct areas, rather than concentrated in Wuhan, where no animal or animal handler responsible for its origin has been put forward by the Chinese government.
President Biden on March 20 signed a bipartisan bill that mandates the declassification of records on the pandemic’s origins, though it’s unclear what material will be redacted. Marshall said that he’s been unable to get his own hands on complete records, even though he has clearance to review the nation’s secrets.
But Marshall said the US government itself hasn’t yet been very forthcoming — and that he hopes especially to further investigate the money trail flowing to Wuhan for research that modified coronavirus.
“Every time I pick on China, we should look in the mirror because our own federal government has kept data from us, they wouldn’t show us information. They wouldn’t let us talk to the right people. So much of it is redacted,” said Marshall, who took on leadership of the Senate Health Committee’s GOP inquiry following the retirement in January of former Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC).
The Wall Street Journal in February revealed that the Energy Department now believes the pandemic began with a Chinese lab leak. The department operates the US National Laboratories, given the assessment additional weight.
FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed after that revelation that the FBI also believes COVID-19 leaked from a lab.
“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News at the time. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”
Under political pressure, Biden in May 2021 ordered a US intelligence community assessment of the origins of COVID-19, after previously saying the US would defer to the World Health Organization to get answers.
US spy agencies assessed in August 2021 that it was “plausible” that the virus came either from a lab release in Wuhan or from a natural origin via animal-to-human transmission.
At the time, a written statement attributed to Biden said: “The world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.”
“Responsible nations do not shirk these kinds of responsibilities to the rest of the world,” the statement said. “Pandemics do not respect international borders, and we all must better understand how COVID-19 came to be in order to prevent further pandemics.”
But Biden, who campaigned heavily in 2020 on mourning pandemic deaths and slamming then-President Donald Trump’s management of the crisis, has hardly mentioned the origins question since then — even walking away from reporters on the White House lawn March 3 when asked about holding China accountable for the outbreak.