House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans report: 'preponderance of evidence' COVID-19 leaked from Wuhan lab; Pfluger reacts

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The COVID-19 pandemic has killed an estimated 4.4 million people worldwide. | Pixabay/Fernando Zhiminaicela

House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans issued a recent update to their Origins of COVID-19 report, now claiming a "preponderance of evidence" suggests the COVID-19 virus leaked from a research lab in Wuhan, China.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), top Republican on the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, released the addendum to the report Aug. 1, based on an inquiry begun March 2020 by Republican staff members of the committee, Newsweek reported.

"Based on the material collected and analyzed by the Committee Minority Staff, the preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019," the report states.

Among the pieces of evidence cited is the "gain-of-function" research known to have been conducted on coronaviruses in the lab, in which the spike protein of a virus known only to infect animals is genetically modified to allow the virus to become infectious to humans for research purposes. The report states this research was sometimes conducted in Wuhan under BSL-2 conditions, which it characterizes as "safety levels similar to a dentist’s office."

Local Republicans weighed in on the report by Congressional Republicans, which also called for a bipartisan investigation into the origins of the pandemic.

"A report by House Foreign GOP sheds light on evidence that COVID-19 originated from the CCP's Wuhan Institute of Virology,” State Rep. August Pfluger (R-Midland) said in a tweet. “Countless lives were lost at the hands of the virus. We cannot rest until the truth is uncovered and justice is served.”

The U.S. intelligence community is divided on the origins of the COVID-19 virus, President Joe Biden said May 26 in a public statement. Two agencies apparently favor the theory that the virus was transmitted by animal-human contact, while the third leans toward the theory that the virus was released in a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Biden asked the intelligence agencies to redouble their efforts to come to a conclusion and report back to him in 90 days, he said in the May 26 statement. He told them to involve our national labs in the investigation and to keep Congress apprised of their progress.

The report by the Republican staff of the Foreign Relations Committee is heavily in favor of the lab accident scenario.

"We now believe it's time to completely dismiss the wet market as the source," said the Republican-backed report. "We also believe the preponderance of the evidence proves the virus did leak from the WIV and that it did so sometime before September 12, 2019."

Chinese authorities have denied that they either deliberately or unintentionally leaked genetically altered coronavirus germs from the Wuhan lab and the Chinese government in Bejing has denied allegations of a coverup. The virus was first detected in Wuhan in 2019.

Located in Central China, Wuhan is the capital city of Hubei Province, a sprawling community with a population of 11 million, according to Wikipedia.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed an estimated 4.4 million people worldwide, Reuters reported.

The Origins of COVID-19 report, which was originally released by the Republican minority in Sept. 2020, did not then conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of a lab leak, nor did the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee as a whole come to this conclusion, Newsweek reported.

Officials of the World Health Organization (WHO) probing the question said it is "extremely unlikely” the virus escaped from a WIV lab, Newsweek reported.