May 8, 2023 at 12:13 p.m.
Senate report: Covid-19 virus came from two Wuhan lab leaks
The report was published in conjunction with the Muddy Waters Group, Dr. Bob Kadlec, and the 117th GOP committee staff. U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Primary Health and Retirement Security, called it a major development.
"This report is a crucial development in getting to the bottom of Covid-19's true origins and exposing the deception of those that sought to conceal how this pandemic started," Marshall said. "A preponderance of evidence in this report suggests there were two separate unintentional lab leaks dating back to fall of 2019 in Wuhan, China, with significant evidence supporting that Covid-19 was a lab-created and altered virus."
Marshall said China has had every opportunity to disprove all of the reports surrounding the origins of Covid-19, but they have not and will not.
"This report also concludes that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] was responding to the coronavirus months before the rest of the world was even aware of its existence, yet China failed to inform the global community of the unfolding disaster," he said. "While today's new report reaffirms much of my previously stated findings on Covid-19's origins, we still need more transparency from the U.S. government - specifically the NIH [National Institutes of Health] - and China. We must also stop gain-of-function research until we can establish additional guardrails to make sure risky lethal research never leaks again."
The 300-page report was the culmination of findings and research conducted for more than two years.
The report
The authors of the report acknowledged that two dominant theories on the origins of the virus exist. The first is that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of a natural zoonotic spillover, that is, it spread from wild animals to humans. The second theory is that the virus infected humans as the result of a research-related incident.
The authors said they had undertaken painstaking research to get to the truth.
"The information contained in this Source Reference Document reflects 18 months of extensive research and accompanying analyses of these two plausible hypotheses," the report states. "This document was the product of a multi-disciplinary effort by medical, scientific, legal, political and general policy analysts to catalog open source (unclassified) information relevant to the respective theories."
Both hypotheses are plausible, the researchers wrote, but the natural zoonotic spillover hypothesis was weakened by the absence of key epidemiological and genetic data from the Huanan Seafood Market. In addition, they wrote, data required to support a natural zoonotic source is dependent on information provided by China, and that information was incomplete or contradictory.
The bottom line?
"The preponderance of circumstantial evidence supports an unintentional research-related incident," the report concludes.
Among the findings, the researchers said epidemiological evidence favors a late October or early November 2019 emergence.
For one thing, data from 16 of 28 countries over a four-year period (2015-2019) identified that increases in influenza-negative ILI (influenza-like illness) occurred on average 13.3 weeks before the occurrence of peak cases. In 2019, the ILI increase associated with influenza-negative laboratory tests in Wuhan during week 46 of 2019 was approximately 13 weeks before the peak incidence of Covid-19 cases in late January-early February 2020.
That points to the late October or early November emergence, the researchers wrote. But that wasn't the only evidence, they asserted.
"Eyewitness accounts, media reports, epidemiological modeling and additional academic studies further support October 28 to November 10 as the window of emergence," the report states. "Diplomats stationed at the U.S. Consulate General in Wuhan have attested to observations of what they believed at the time to be the early onset of a 'bad flu' season."
Then, too, the deputy consular chief recalled that by mid-October 2019, his team knew that the city had been struck by what was thought to be an unusually vicious flu season, and it worsened in November.
According to the report, those observations were reported to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
"In August 2021, a veteran Washington Post policy columnist reported that at least one of the WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) researchers became ill in early November 2019 and exhibited symptoms highly specific to Covid-19, including the loss of smell and ground-glass opacities in his lungs," the report states.
Not living in a vacuum
Again the researchers said that, in a vacuum, the natural zoonotic spillover hypothesis was a plausible explanation for how the Covid-19 pandemic started, but they added that there were caveats.
"Applied to the facts here, however, there are a number of gaps and anomalies in the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak," the report states. "The early Covid-19 pandemic is different compared to the emergence of infectious diseases via past natural zoonotic spillovers, most notably the 2003-2004 SARS-CoV outbreak."
For instance, the researchers wrote, recent natural zoonotic spillovers of respiratory viruses with pandemic potential have left behind evidence of where and how they occurred.
"It would be expected that environmental samples collected from wet markets that were positive for SARS-CoV-2 would likely show evidence of animal genetic adaptation," the study stated. "A study authored by the former director of China's CDC George Fu Gao analyzed 1,380 samples collected from the environment (923) and animals (457) within the Huanan Seafood Market in early 2020. His study identified 73 SARS-CoV-2 positive environmental samples."
From those positive samples, the researchers wrote, three live viruses were successfully isolated from the environmental samples, but none of the samples taken from the 18 animal species found in the market were positive for SARS- CoV-2.
"The three live viruses from environmental isolates were sequenced," the study stated. "These viruses shared 99.980 percent to 99.993 percent similarity with human isolates recovered from Wuhan (HCoV/Wuhan/IVDC-HB-01) and showed no evidence of animal adaptation."
As such, the researchers continued, the absence of key epidemiological and genetic data of the initial outbreak raises questions about the likelihood of the Huanan Seafood Market serving as the location of SARS-CoV-2 emergence.
"Data supports the presence of potential susceptible animals such as palm civets and raccoon dogs at the Huanan Seafood Market," the study stated. "There have been no documented positive SARS-CoV-2 animal samples from any Wuhan wet market. Nor have vendors of these animals tested positive. Further, the suspected natural hosts, bats or pangolins, were not sold at the Huanan market."
That said, the researchers cautioned, the initial response efforts by local authorities to immediately close the market, remove all live animals, and sanitize the facility could have impacted the likelihood of recovering viable environmental samples. Still, they continued, the genetic sequencing of environmental samples recovered from the Huanan market showed them identical to recovered human clinical samples.
"To date, China has not acknowledged the infection or positive serological sample(s) of any susceptible animal prior to the recognized outbreak," the report stated.
No smoking gun
As for a research-related incident and laboratory-acquired infection (LAI), that, too, was plausible, the researchers asserted, but though the circumstantial evidence was considerable, there was no smoking gun.
"While any laboratory is susceptible to LAI's, as early as 2015, some western scientists called into question whether the potential benefits to be gained from the WIV's coronavirus research involving the genetic manipulation and creation of chimeric viruses was worth the considerable risks to public health," the report stated. "In 2017, other scientists warned of the potential dual-use applications of such research, and worried about 'pathogens escaping' in light of China's history of laboratory leaks, particularly several LAI involving SARS."
Those warnings coincided with the opening of the WIV's Biosafety Level (BSL) 4 laboratory in January 2017, the researchers observed, noting that there were safety fears almost immediately.
"A January 2018 U.S. Department of State cable reported that 'the new lab had a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high- containment laboratory,'" the report stated. "The cable further cautioned that the WIV's work with bat coronaviruses potentially posed a risk of a SARS-related pandemic."
That same month, the researchers continued, the WIV submitted 13 of its total 17 patents for biosafety related improvements, with applications covering a range of remedial actions for physical containment (hermetically sealed doors), wastewater treatment, decontamination (autoclaves and chemical showers), and maintaining negative air pressure in the high-containment laboratories (exhaust air management).
The researchers stressed that the number of patents, by itself, was not unusual because high-containment laboratories constantly seek to improve, through innovation, the biosafety posture of their facility. Still, they wrote, the nature of the issues and problems the WIV was remediating is revealing to their state of biosafety at the time.
"One patent addressed the problem of maintaining airtight seals on gas-tight doors and cites the potential problem of existing door seals that developed slow leaks over time," the report states. "Another patent addressed developing a manually operated auxiliary exhaust fan to maintain negative pressure and improve disinfection of biosecurity laboratories' HEPA filters."
Yet another described improving the design and operation of biosafety autoclave sterilizers.
"This patent described problems of being unable to achieve required sterilization temperatures, potential leaks around the autoclave doors and excessive condensation of autoclaved infectious materials," the report stated.
Nonetheless, the researchers observed, despite those apparent biosafety challenges, the WIV's research continued apace to identify potential human pandemic-causing SARS-related coronaviruses and medical countermeasures to mitigate them. In pursuit of the task, they wrote, researchers collected hundreds of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from across China and Southeast Asia.
What's more, another patent submitted in February 2020, suggests Chinese researchers in Wuhan were feverishly working on a vaccine,.
"The patent included mouse-derived serological data from vaccine-related experiments which experts, consulted with during this investigation, assess could not have been completed unless work had begun on vaccine development before the known outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in late-December 2019," the report states. "The research required both access to the sequence of and the live SARS-CoV-2 virus."
Several experts assessed that [Professor Zhou Yusen, director of the 5th Institute at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences] likely would have had to start vaccine development research no later than November 2019 to achieve the February patent submission date, the report stated.
Zhou later published transgenic mouse infection and vaccine challenge studies in mice, including humanized mice and non-human primates, the researchers reported.
"The location(s) where Zhou's animal vaccine challenge studies were performed was not disclosed," the report states. "There is reason to believe that these vaccine experiments were performed at the original WIV's downtown Wuhan campus and possibly at the Wuhan University Institute of Animal Models located approximately a mile from the WIV."
All in all, the report found, the preponderance of information supports the plausibility of an unintentional research-related incident that likely resulted from failures of biosafety containment during SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-related research.
"The identified underlying biosafety issues increased the likelihood that such containment failures were not immediately recognized," the report stated. "The possibility of unrecognized biocontainment breaches combined with SARS-CoV-2's clinical characteristics of asymptomatic and mild clinical illness in the majority of infections, likely confounded early recognition and containment of the initial outbreak. Such initial unrecognized infections could serve as the nidus of the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan and is a plausible proximate cause of the pandemic."
In the wake of the report, Marshall is again pursuing a viral gain of function research moratorium on all federal research grants to universities and other organizations conducting gain-of-function research and risky research on potential pandemic pathogens.
Richard Moore is the author of "Dark State" and may be reached at richardd3d.substack.com.
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