After a two-year investigation, a government report concluded dangerous virus research in China ‘is the most likely origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.’
The 525-page report from the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final findings Monday and presented several of the ‘strongest arguments’ to support the lab leak theory.
They wrote there are biological characteristics of the virus that are not found in nature; there is evidence to support a single introduction of the virus to humans, not multiple zoonotic spillover events; and Wuhan – where the virus was first detected – is home to China’s largest SARS research lab – the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The report also cited US intelligence reports that several researchers at the WIV were sick with a Covid-like virus in the fall of 2019 notes a lack of direct evidence linking the virus to animals at the nearby Wuhan wet market or its supply chain, a theory that has prevailed among a wide swathe of scientists.
WIV has long been at the center of the contentious lab leak debate because researchers there routinely tinker with and genetically modify viruses to become more virulent or transmissible.
And the subcommittee’s report is not the first to suggest the Covid-19 pandemic began in a Wuhan lab.
An analysis of data from a Harvard-based molecular scientist outlined five reasons earlier this year that Covid was most likely manufactured by Chinese scientists.
A third report concluded the virus leaked from a Chinese lab with a 70 percent certainty and documents reviewed by DailyMail.com laid out plans to ‘engineer spike proteins’ to infect human cells that would then be ‘inserted into SARS-Covid backbones’ at the WIV in December 2018.