A former Trump deputy national security adviser said that the “preponderance of circumstantial evidence” points toward an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab as he called for a bipartisan congressional commission to investigate the origins of COVID-19 and for a ban on gain-of-function research.
Matthew Pottinger, who served on the National Security Council during the Trump administration, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, at which he was asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, what he thought about how the virus emerged and whether the lab leak hypothesis was worth looking into.
“I think that the preponderance of circumstantial evidence — and it’s important to note that it is still circumstantial evidence — weighs in favor of the hypothesis that this was an accentual leak from a laboratory, not a natural zoonotic event,” Pottinger said. “China does not want us to actually find the answer to the question of what exactly happened, and I think that a bipartisan commission should be quickly established that has subpoena power.”
Pottinger added: “I think that we need to halt gain-of-function research and take the lead globally in really reinstituting the Obama administration ban on gain-of-function research — which was designed to help predict the current pandemic but may have actually seeded it. And I think one area would be to start building a surveillance network for — you know, the technology is there, and with a little more effort could be quite powerful, at detecting pathogenic disease through a global surveillance network.”
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Cotton replied that he believed a lab leak was most likely, and said the Chinese government needed to be held accountable.
“I agree with you that all the evidence points towards those labs, and I mean all the evidence. There’s not a single piece of evidence that points toward that stupid food market the Chinese Communist Party used as a cover story. But I also agree with you that China doesn’t want us to discover it, so I’m very skeptical that we’ll ever get direct evidence of the origin of the Wuhan labs,” Cotton said. “But we can make reasonable inferences based on what we know, common sense, as you have, Mr. Pottinger, that this virus originated in those labs — and China needs to face grave consequences for unleashing this plague on the world.”
Officials from both the Trump and Biden administrations have said the Chinese government worked for over a year to thwart an independent investigation into the origins of the virus. Both administrations have cast doubt on the manner in which the joint study from China and the World Health Organization was conducted earlier this year. The WHO-China report said a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and that a jump from animals to humans was most likely.
EcoHealth Alliance received at least $3.7 million from the National Institutes of Health from 2014 to 2020, and Peter Daszak, a key member of the WHO-China joint study team and the leader of EcoHealth, steered at least $600,000 in NIH funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research. Daszak criticized the United States for appearing skeptical of the WHO’s findings earlier this year and defended China to Chinese Communist Party-linked outlets. U.S. Embassy officials in China raised concerns in 2018 about lax biosecurity at the Wuhan lab led by Shi Zhengli, dubbed “bat woman,” who worked closely with Daszak.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins are adamant in insisting the NIH did not fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab, but they also admit they don’t actually know what the secretive Chinese lab has been up to.
A State Department fact sheet released in January contended Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)” and that the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.” The fact sheet also contended that the lab “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military” and that lab workers became sick with COVID-19-like symptoms in autumn 2019.
The intelligence community confirmed last month that one of its 18 spy agencies is leaning toward the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis on COVID-19’s origins, while two are leaning toward a natural origin.
Also Tuesday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said, “One point of consensus seems to be that the Chinese regime has been painfully uncooperative with efforts to uncover the origins.” Blumenthal said China’s “lack of cooperation” was “perhaps verging on deliberate cover-up” and he asked the other witnesses “what can be done to prompt and persuade the Communist Party, which essentially runs China, that world health depends on their being more forthcoming.”
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Dr. Evan Medeiros, a professor of U.S.-China studies at Georgetown University, said that “it’s important to keep in mind that the origins of the virus may very well touch on the question of regime legitimacy, and it’s one of the reasons why the government has been so incredibly untransparent and uncooperative, so it’s an uphill battle.” He said he supported a bipartisan commission on the origins and contended that “the best opportunity to influence leadership [of China] on being transparent and cooperative would be … if an international consensus were to emerge that the Chinese needed to share more information.”
