Bombshell Senate report says there could have been at least TWO lab leaks in Wuhan that triggered COVID: New details claim China started working on a vaccine earlier than first reported
Yet another congressional report on the origins of COVID-19 concluded that the pandemic was likely caused by at least two lab leaks from the Wuhan lab in China.
A new 301-page Senate report released by Sen. Roger Marshall on Monday night highlights a series of previous failures at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and notes that there are no known naturally-occurring incidents of COVID-19.
It comes just as Trump-era Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe prepares to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Tuesday morning.
Marshall, a doctor by trade and top GOP member of the Primary Health and Retirement Security Subcommittee on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions panel, said the report is crucial in ‘exposing the deception of those that sought to conceal how this pandemic started.’
The report says the theory claiming COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans can no longer hold the ‘presumption of accuracy.’
A new bombshell Senate report concludes that COVID-19 likely came from at least two lab leaks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and that the theory it came from an animal can no longer be assumed
The report was released by Primary Health and Retirement Security Subcommittee Chair Roger Marshall (pictured)
‘The preponderance of information affirms the plausibility of a research-related incident that was likely unintentional resulting from failures of biosafety containment during vaccine-related research,’ the report states.
Senator Mike Braun, a member of the HELP panel and ranking member of the Employment and Workplace Safety subcommittee, said that it has always been the case that facts point to a lab leak from China for the start of COVID-19.
‘From the beginning, there was strong evidence pointing to the Wuhan lab as the origin of COVID, but it was called a conspiracy theory because the wrong people believed it,’ Braun said in a statement to DailyMail.com.
He added: ‘Now it’s been almost a month since President Biden signed the unanimous, bipartisan bill from Senator Josh Hawley and me to declassify all U.S. COVID intel related to the Wuhan lab, and we’ve still not seen a word of it.’
The authors of the report, published in conjunction with the Muddy Waters Group, Dr. Bob Kadlec and Dr. Bob Foster, said that the evidence is ‘circumstantial’, and have only been hampered by lack of cooperation from China.
Yet they remain confident that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab.
Kadlec served as Health and Human Services (HHS) assistant secretary for preparedness and response during the Trump administration.
President Joe Biden has ordered that all documentation from the U.S. government about the virus be made public .
Chinese researchers began development of at least two COVID vaccines in November 2019 – a month before the first cases in China were reported. The first U.S. case was confirmed on January 20, 2020.
The existence of the vaccine at that time ‘means SARS-CoV-2 would have been present at the WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) before the known outbreak of the pandemic,’ the authors write.
They note, however, that there is no actual evidence of COVID-19 being present inside the Wuhan Institute.
A doctor is pictured at work in Wuhan in February 2020
Richard Burr, who stepped down as a senator in January, oversaw the report when he was minority leader of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee
They conclude that the pandemic most likely began with a lab leak, but it is highly probable we will never know for sure.
China has insisted that the virus passed naturally from animals to humans, and have denied reports of a lab leak.
Trump-era Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe is testifying to Congress on the origins of COVID on Tuesday
‘This report also concludes that the CCP 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,’ Sen. Marshall said in a statement on the report.
The Kansas lawmaker added: ‘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- 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.’
Entitled ‘Muddy Waters: The origin of COVID-19’, the report was first championed by Senator Richard Burr, a Republican representing North Carolina, who stepped down in January and worked on the report until the end of his tenure.
Marshall, who served with Burr on the HELP Committee, decided to release the entire report. A summary of the report was released in January and the full text followed this week.
A summary of the report (above) was released in January: the full version was published on Monday
A former senior aide to Burr, who provided the full report to Axios on Monday, said the report was somewhat abandoned when Burr left office, but was still a useful contribution to the debate.
‘Since the team did not complete their work before Senator Burr left office this became a product without a home,’ the former aide said.
‘Former Senator Burr has not reviewed this document and it didn’t go through the same vetting process our executive summary document released last year did, but this is worth releasing, in my view, and reflects the quality of work that was done by the team.’
Kadlec, a physician and retired Air Force colonel, said he believed China was motivated to explore the COVID-19 virus after their country was battered by SARS from 2002-4. SARS killed 8,000 people worldwide – more than 5,000 of them in China.
‘I think there is a really reasonable logic to what the Chinese might be doing with regard to SARS coronavirus vaccines because they saw the impact SARS had on their country,’ said Kadlec.
He told Axios: ‘They had more than enough reason — as we did post 9/11 — to try to do things to protect ourselves.’
The Burr-Kadlec report is just the latest Congressional paper to conclude that the lab leak theory was probable.
Donald Trump is seen with Robert Kadlec (left), CDC director Robert Redfield (second right) and Mike Pence on February 26, 2020
In September 2020, Michael McCaul, a Republican serving as minority leader of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, did not blame the Wuhan lab – but did blame the Chinese authorities for covering up the outbreak.
‘It is beyond doubt that the CCP actively engaged in a cover-up designed to obfuscate data, hide relevant public health information, and suppress doctors and journalists who attempted to warn the world,’ McCaul’s report states.
‘By responding in a transparent and responsible manner, the CCP could have supported the global public health response and shared information with the world about how to handle the virus.
‘It is likely the ongoing pandemic could have been prevented had they done so, saving hundreds of thousands of lives and the world from an economic meltdown.’
Democrats appeared less interested in the origins of the pandemic, and more focused on the errors of the Trump administration.
In December 2022, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released their final report, which argues that structural weaknesses, leadership failings and the spread of misinformation contributed to the deaths of more than a million Americans during the pandemic.
When Republicans took control of the House, the focus shifted back to the origins of the pandemic.
In January, the U.S. Energy Department concluded with ‘low confidence’ that the pandemic ‘likely’ originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, according to a classified report shared with those sitting on the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
A month later, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said that the FBI believes COVID probably originated from a ‘potential lab incident’ in Wuhan. But, he added, the Chinese government has blocked the work of FBI investigators.
Robert Redfield, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in March told the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic – now Republican controlled – that he believed the virus likely originated in the Chinese lab.
‘Based on my initial analysis of the data, I came to believe and I still believe today that it indicates that COVID-19 more likely was a result of an accidental lab leak than the result of a natural spillover event,’ Redfield told the committee.
‘This conclusion is based primarily on the biology of the virus itself.’