Republicans Call for Biden Officials to Provide Information on COVID Origins

Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) during a House Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing in Washington DC, on Sept. 26, 2017. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Two top House Republicans on Feb. 27 called on Biden administration agencies to release information they hold on the origins of COVID-19.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) made the request in the wake of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announcement that it now believes in a theory—once widely derided by many public health experts—that a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, was the source of the global COVID-19 pandemic that has killed an untold number of people in China, 6.9 million people worldwide, and more than 1 million in the United States.

Chinese public health officials in Wuhan in December 2019 identified the first cases of humans infected with COVID-19.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading medical advisor to Presidents Trump and Biden during the pandemic, has argued against and dismissed the lab leak theory.

Wenstrup and Comer issued jointly-signed letters to DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) Director Christopher Wray asking for the data and intelligence.

During the previous Congress, Republicans found their investigations into the beginning of COVID-19 stymied. Now in control of the lower chamber, they are exercising their fact-finding powers.

Last fall, Republican members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee issued a research report that supported the Wuhan lab leak theory.

The report concluded that while the history of disease outbreak “favors the hypothesis” of animal-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (the strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19) as the origin of the pandemic, the pandemic “was most likely the result of a research-related incident.”

Researchers in the Wuhan lab, which has a history of accidents, studied viruses in the same family as SARS-CoV-2.

Fauci and the NIH and Research at the Wuhan Lab

The DOE announcement may put Dr. Fauci in the hot seat.

Fauci, who retired at the end of 2022 from his post as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is the face of medical and scientific expertise on the pandemic.

Dr. Anthony Fauci in Washington on Dec. 9, 2022. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

Republicans have suggested that a reason motivating Fauci to cast disrepute on the possibility that SARS-Cov-2 escaped from a lab is that if the theory is true, then the United States may have underwritten the conditions that resulted in the leak.

In 2018 and 2019, NIAID, one of the 27 institutes under the National Institute of Health (NIH), provided funding to a U.S. nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which EcoHealth used to finance controversial “gain-of-function” (GOF) research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Those conducting GOF research modify viruses and make them more potent and contagious to develop better ways to prevent pandemics.