Senate Republicans examining the origin of the pandemic concluded it was likely the result of a leak of the coronavirus from a laboratory, claiming there is a lack of evidence for the possibility it was instead passed from animals to humans.
Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee released a report Thursday laying out evidence to support a theory that COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, detailing the lab’s bat coronavirus research and history of biosafety problems, but said decisive conclusion could not be made.
“Based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident,” the interim report read. “New information, made publicly available and independently verifiable, could change this assessment. However, the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of accuracy.”
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The report concluded that there were “critical” outstanding questions about the zoonotic origin theory, such as what animal was the first host of the virus and where did it first infect humans, that suggests the theory is “unlikely.”
“Critical corroborating evidence of a natural zoonotic spillover is missing. While the absence of evidence is not itself evidence, the lack of corroborating evidence of a zoonotic spillover or spillovers, three years into the pandemic, is highly problematic,” the report read.
While the report, spearheaded solely by Republican lawmakers, suggested a lab leak was a more probable origin, it noted that they could not come to a clear answer, lacking indisputable evidence.
Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, the top Republican on the committee, said that a lack of transparency from government and public health officials in China prevented the group from coming to a “more definitive conclusion.”
Senate HELP Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA), who was not involved in the report, said she was still committed to examining the origins of SARS-CoV-2 under the bipartisan PREVENT Pandemics Act, which calls for setting up an independent task force to investigate the origins.
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Theories pointing to a lab leak or zoonotic spillover have been the prevailing hypotheses presented since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, though no clear consensus has been made.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says that recent research has suggested that the virus originated from bats and was transferred to humans. The Director of NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has also expressed that a natural origin is the most likely theory.
