Last week, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released another worthless report, punting yet again on making a definitive determination on the origin of COVID. On May 26, President Joe Biden gave the intelligence community 90 days to “redouble their efforts” and “bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” on how COVID emerged.
It failed.
Over 600,000 people have died of COVID so far in the United States, yet the best our intelligence experts can tell us is that some “elements” of the intelligence community have “low confidence” in the conclusion that COVID originated naturally from animals, while other “elements” have “moderate confidence” that COVID originated in a lab. This is essentially a shrug, unchanged from what was released in May.
The public deserves answers, including about whether its own government had a role in funding research that helped unleash this virus upon the world. The National Institutes of Health provided over $3 million in grants to an organization called the EcoHealth Alliance to study “the risk of future coronavirus emergence” in China. From that grant, $600,000 made it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is suspected of experimenting with and releasing the virus.
Congress has the power to subpoena the NIH for all documents related to this grant and other grants implementing “gain of function” research on viruses. But so far, Democrats have refused to authorize such a move. Their motive is clear: They want to blame Donald Trump for COVID, and at the same time, they want to protect China from blame. Rep. James Clyburn admitted as much in a letter to congressional Republicans earlier this year, after they asked the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis to investigate where the virus came from. “We are concerned that your request may be designed not to obtain new information to protect Americans’ health, but to deflect accountability for the Trump administration’s failed response to the crisis,” Clyburn wrote.
Yet what could be more relevant to “protecting Americans’ health” than the possibility that dangerous government-funded research caused this, or that China’s communist regime is responsible for not one but two outbreaks of a SARS virus this century?
Instead of a much-needed congressional investigation into the origins of COVID, Democrats are bent on wasting everyone’s time and money on yet more hearings into the Jan. 6 riot.
What happened at the United States Capitol on Jan. 6 was inexcusable, and those who broke the law that day are rightly being prosecuted — 624 people, as of this writing.
Between the FBI’s investigation and the 14 full hearings that Congress held on this topic even before the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack had its first meeting, the truth has been laid bare ad nauseam. Some of the participants at a political rally turned violent and overran an underprepared Capitol Police deployment. Eventually, order was restored after additional officers from other law enforcement agencies helped to secure the Capitol.
That’s it. It’s not pretty, but the FBI and the Justice Department have diligently investigated and are prosecuting those who broke the law.
Congress should let them do their job. Meanwhile, Democrats should let Congress get back to doing real and important work on COVID, instead of wringing this modern-day bloody shirt for whatever drops of political advantage they think they can get out of it.
