The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic has announced that it will hold its first hearing on the origins of COVID-19 on March 8.
“This investigation must begin with where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to ‘predict, prepare, protect, or prevent’ it from happening again,” he said.
“Government scientists and government funded researchers have so far been less-than-forthcoming in their knowledge and actions, including work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and potential pandemic pathogens,” he added, without mentioning names.
‘Potential Lab Incident’
According to a Wall Street Journal article published on Feb. 26, a classified intelligence report by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) concluded that a laboratory leak was “likely,” though the judgment was made with “low confidence.”The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which houses a bio-safety level 4 lab, is located a short distance from a local wet market, where clusters of infection cases were first reported in late 2019.
The Chinese regime has denied that the virus origin was linked to the WIV and has thrown its weight behind a natural zoonotic hypothesis—that the virus was transmitted to humans from an animal host.
The March hearing will feature several witnesses, including Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); Dr. Jamie Metzl, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; and Nicholas Wade, former editor for Nature and Science journals and The New York Times.
“We can’t accept more years of stonewalling; the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is committed to conducting a proper investigation that the American people have demanded,” Wenstrup added.
Investigation
In early February, Wenstrup and House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) sent several letters seeking information on COVID-19 from Dr. Anthony Fauci; Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance; Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence; Dr. Francis Collins, acting science adviser to President Joe Biden; and Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.The two lawmakers also asked Fauci, Daszak, and Collins to sit for transcribed interviews.
WIV Researchers Who Became Sick
The names of WIV researchers who fell ill in the autumn of 2019, as well as their symptoms and their roles in the institute, would be part of the information required by the bill to be declassified.“The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” the fact sheet reads.
It adds, “This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was ‘zero infection’ among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.”
