The House subcommittee investigating the origins of Covid-19 opened its first hearing with top scientific experts who said they believed the virus had likely leaked from a lab, including a ‘lifelong Democrat‘ and former Biden staffer.
Dr. Jamie Metzl, a former Biden staffer and self-identified Democrat, said he favored the lab leak theory because ‘the Chinese government has done everything in its power’ to stonewall investigations.
Metzl then said China had an ‘incentive’ to find the animal where Covid-19 had originated while pushing the animal-to-human transmission theory, but hadn’t done so.
‘Given that the Chinese government has every incentive to find intermediary host, it’s very significant that hasn’t been found,’ Metzl said. ‘I think it’s very telling after three years we haven’t found it.’
Dr. Paul Auwaerter, an infectious disease expert invited by Democrats on the committee, pointed out it took years to find the intermediary hosts after outbreaks of SARS and MERS.
Witnesses sworn in at first Covid origins hearing
This photo taken on February 24, 2020 shows a doctor operating a machine as medical staff treat patients infected by the COVID-19 coronavirus at a hospital in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province
‘There’s going to be no doubt that a research related origin remains a very serious possibility, if not a distinct probability. There is no smoking gun including a laboratory origin hypothesis. but the growing body and circumstantial evidence suggests that gun that us at very least, warm to the touch,’ Metzl said.
Rep. Brad Wenstrup, chair of the committee, said there was no ‘smoking gun’ to prove the virus had spilled out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and but also said there was ‘no evidence Covid evolved from an animal,’ either.
He highlighted the lack of safety practices at the WIV as Dr. Robert Redfield said there was ‘no doubt’ the National Institutes of Health (NIH), State Department, US Agency of International Development and Department of Defense were funding gain-of-function research.
Redfield called for a moratorium on gain-of-function research until there was a ‘consensus’ on its benefit to society.
Redfield said there was evidence of the virus as early as September 2019 and stated three now-declassified ‘highly irregular’ findings pointing to the lab leak theory – he said researchers deleted sequences, changed command and control of the WIV from civilian to military and allowed a contractor to redo the ventilation in the lab, which Redfield called ‘really telling.’
Rep. James Comer, chair of the Oversight Committee, asked all four witnesses about the Proximal Origins paper from early 2020.
‘Yes or no was there science available to make such an unequivocal statement against the possibility of a lab that early in February?’ the Kentucky Republican asked.
Three witnesses said no, Democratic witness Auwaerter said he didn’t have ‘sufficient’ evidence to say.
Redfield said that as CDC director he was shut out of high-level conversations after he told Dr. Anthony Fauci in early 2020 he did not think natural spillover was ‘scientifically plausible.’
‘It was told to me they wanted a single narrative and I had a different point of view.’
Reports have now come out that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, commissioned a scientific paper at the start of the pandemic, known as the proximal origin paper, that cast doubt on the idea that Covid-19 came from a lab.
Referring to the proximal origin paper, Redfield said: ‘It is antithetical to science. Science has debate and they squashed debate.’
Fauci in November testimony at a social media court case said he could not recall Redfield calling him in mid-January 2020 to tell him about the potential of virus manipulation.
GOP Rep. John Joyce, R-Pa., noted the House is set to vote on declassifying the FBI and Department of Energy’s findings that led them to announce coronavirus likely originated in a lab. He asked how important it is to declassify the information.
On the virus’s origin, Redfield said: ‘I don’t think that answers going to come from the scientific community. I think it’s going come from the intelligence community.’
‘I think declassification is very important,’ Redfield added. ‘There are some method and sourcing issues that you guys are going to have to wrestle with,’ he added.
Redfield said that Fauci took the natural origin position because ‘that’s what happened with SARS and MERs,’ but those viruses came about before 2012 when the U.S. wasn’t involved in gain of function research.
Redfield said he tried to explain to Fauci that the virus was far more tailored to human-to-human transmission than SARS and MERS. ‘I immediately said, “Wait a second, this isn’t natural.’”
Democrats focused much of their time on a 2014 book written by witness Nicholas Wade, the former editor of the New York Times science section and Nature and Science magazines.
Democrats noted the book, ‘A Troublesome Inheritance,’ which focuses on biological racial differences, has been cited by white supremacists.
‘I am absolutely offended that you would have the opportunity take this platform and to add anything of significance to it,’ Rep. Kweisi Mfume, D-Md., said.
‘I’m sorry, too, that Mr. Mfume didn’t like my book. I am not a racist,’ Wade said.
