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TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – A report released by House Republicans in the United States earlier this month concluded that the “preponderance of evidence” points to a COVID-19 leak from one of the labs in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) early September 2019 at the latest.
On August 2, Mike McCaul (R-TX), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released an 84-page report on the origins of COVID. The report dismissed the infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the source of the outbreak and concluded that “the preponderance of evidence proves that the virus leaked from the WIV and did so before the 12th. September 2019 “.
Rather than the biosafety level IV (BSL-4) laboratory most often mentioned in debates on WIV’s new campus, the report focused on its headquarters at the institute’s original location in Wuchang district in Wuhan, where BSL-2 and BSL-3 laboratories are located. . The report states that this is where WIV principal investigator Shi Zhengli (石正麗) – also known as “Bat Woman” – had conducted gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses over the years. that preceded the pandemic.
The report pointed out that there had been a number of reports of safety issues regarding WIV facilities, including a warning from George Gao, director of the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the dangers of “WIV”. synthetic origin of SARS similar to SARS. coronavirus “which have acquired the ability to infect human cells. The document then listed a number of maintenance and repair projects undertaken at the WIV in 2019, including a project to renovate the hazardous waste treatment system.
On September 12, 2019, the public WIV database containing 22,000 virus samples and sequences collected from bats and mice was suddenly and inexplicably taken offline. To date, the database has yet to be made public, with Shi giving conflicting explanations as to why it was taken offline.
An analysis of satellite imagery over the two and a half years leading up to December 19, 2019, found that parking lots at the six hospitals closest to WIV’s headquarters were at their peak in September and October of the same year. During this period, Wuhan-based searches for the terms “cough” and “diarrhea” on Chinese search engine Baidu also started to climb.
Chinese state media reported in January 2020 that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Major General Chen Wei, an expert in biology and chemical weapons defense, had been sent to Wuhan to take the reins. from the BSL-4 laboratory of the WIV. However, the report cites testimony from a former senior US official that Chen had in fact started overseeing the lab in late 2019, possibly indicating that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the outbreak even earlier. .
The authors of the report claimed that “it is reasonable to conclude” that based on the WIV’s work on handling bat viruses and the September events, the laboratory scientists had either been infected with a naturally occurring virus. taken from the wild or by a genetically engineered virus. . The infected researchers then likely spread the virus by taking shuttles or the Wuhan Metro Line 2, which serves the WIV, Wuhan CDC, Huanan Seafood Market, and Wuhan International Airport.
The 2019 Military World Games, which took place in October and brought together 9,308 athletes from 109 countries, were identified by the report as a possible major international event. The report cited a Luxembourg athlete who called Wuhan a “ghost town” and a Canadian competitor who said he and 60 teammates had fallen ill, showing symptoms such as “fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia”, and were isolated. on the return flight.
The report concluded that, in the opinion of Republican members of the committee, the extent of the information available, China’s documented attempts to “cover up, hide and destroy evidence”, and the lack of physical evidence to the contrary prove that “SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released” from a WIV facility at some point before September 12, 2019. He said the virus could have been obtained from nature or genetically engineered and suggested that it was collected from a cave in Yunnan province between 2012 and 2015.
On August 3, China’s Foreign Ministry responded to the report saying it was “totally based on concocted lies and distorted facts without providing any evidence, and that it was neither credible nor scientific.” The ministry then followed Beijing’s tactic of deflecting attention to US coronavirus research: “Why aren’t members of Congress finding out if there is such research at home and whether or not it may or may not have been there? to create the new coronavirus?
An order issued on May 26 by President Biden calling on the intelligence community to provide a report on the origins of COVID-19 after 90 days is expected on August 24.
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