A nonpartisan commission of former government officials and scientists is calling on the federal government to hold China accountable for COVID-19, finding that the virus was likely the result of a lab leak.

The commission, organized by the conservative Heritage Foundation, was chaired by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and included former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield. 

Also on the panel was former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp and leading biosecurity expert Jamie Metzl, a Democrat and liberal.

“For our purposes today, we come together as Democrats, Republicans, Americans, and human beings to demand accountability for this totally avoidable crisis,” Metzl said at a press conference announcing the report on Monday.

The 64-page report, boasting 228 footnotes, concludes that the preponderance of the evidence thus far points toward a lab incident as the origin of the virus and calls for a variety of legislative solutions aimed at preventing the next pandemic.

But with 28 million lives lost worldwide and the estimated $18 trillion lost for the United States alone due to COVID-19, the commission concluded that China needed to be held accountable, regardless of the pandemic’s origins.

“The case that is made, the recommendations that are forthcoming, it doesn’t matter what the origins were,” Ratcliffe said. 

Metzl said that even if the evidence supporting a natural, non-lab-related origin “should miraculously appear,” the commission would recommend Congress and the executive branch to take more substantial action.

“With 28 million people dead as a result of COVID-19 and tens of trillions of dollars in damages, it is simply unacceptable and frankly unimaginable that every stone should not be overturned, examining what went wrong as an essential foundation of our efforts to build a safer future in an ideal world,” Metzl said.

Redfield said at the press conference that the evidence strongly suggests that the Chinese Communist Party was likely aware of the severity of the virus as early as August 2019 due to key changes at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the suspected site of the lab leak.

Scientists at the WIV had long conducted research on coronaviruses at a safety level significantly lower than what would have been legally permissible in the U.S.

Beginning in September 2019, the People’s Liberation Army changed the status of the WIV from a civilian to a military institution and began construction on the facility to improve its ventilation, both indications to Redfield that dangerous research had taken place.

According to Redfield, researchers in the fall of 2019 also “deleted their entire research records of all the sequences of every coronavirus they’d ever sequenced for over a decade.”

The commission highlights that a project initially proposed to the U.S. Department of Defense in 2018 may have been conducted by researchers in China without American funding or knowledge.

The project, known as the DEFUSE proposal, was presented to the DOD in 2018 by scientists at EcoHealth Alliance, the WIV, and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

If funded, researchers would have manipulated a coronavirus to make it more easily transmissible among humans, and it would have had similar characteristics to the virus we now know as SARS-CoV-2.

“Although the U.S. government did not approve the DEFUSE proposal, it is common practice for researchers to seek funding for work that has already begun,” the commission’s report says. “The WIV would not have needed to rely on the desired U.S. government funding in order to pursue this dangerous research independently.”

Ratcliffe called creating a 9/11-style commission to investigate the origins of COVID-19 “probably the biggest, most important recommendation that we made” in the report.

The leaders suggest that the commission should not only review China’s negligence and malfeasance but also evaluate U.S. domestic policies that facilitated the development. 

“It would have been better had this happened four years ago, but every moment that we don’t learn the lessons of this failure, we are in danger,” said Metzl, a longtime advocate of a federal COVID-19 commission.

Ratcliffe referenced the intelligence community report published last year outlining the investigations of the myriad of agencies on the origins of COVID-19, with only the FBI and the Department of Energy concluding that the virus originated in a lab. 

The former national intelligence director said that he suspects that there are “political and financial considerations” that have prevented the intelligence community writ large from endorsing the lab leak theory.

The report calls on elected officials and bureaucrats to acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic as comparable to “the dawning of the nuclear age and necessitating comparably significant changes in US law, policy, diplomacy, government, commerce, and academic affairs.” 

“As the dropping of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessitated the establishment of new domestic and international norms, standards, and institutions, so the example of COVID-19 is more than enough to justify dramatic public concern and policy innovation in biosecurity,” the report reads.

Legislative recommendations along these lines involve auditing all biomedical and related research funding in China with high suspicion, as well as reevaluating biological weapons laws and international compliance. 

The commission also recommends a series of actions for the president and the executive branch to toughen diplomacy with China, especially with respect to any technological investment.

“There needs to be a discussion directly with the leader of the People’s Republic of China that says that the United States is aware of their conduct, and how nefarious and sinister it is, and that there has to be accountability for that going back and going forward,” Ratcliffe said.