Bombshell COVID-19 origins hearing will feature Wuhan lab leak and Fauci silencing effort

Jerry Dunleavy

March 08, 05:51 AM March 08, 05:52 AM

The Wuhan lab leak hypothesis will be front and center during a new House hearing on the coronavirus, with its witnesses featuring prominent voices who have argued COVID-19 likely originated in a Chinese lab.

The Republican-led Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will be hosting a hearing on “Investigating the Origins of COVID-19” on Wednesday, and it is likely to touch on not just the Wuhan Institute of Virology but also gain-of-function research funded by the National Institutes of Health, the attempted silencing of the lab leak hypothesis by officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Chinese obfuscation and obstruction.

WHAT WE KNOW ON THE WUHAN LAB LEAK DEBATE

“This investigation must begin with where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to ‘predict, prepare, protect, or prevent’ it from happening again,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), chairman of the subcommittee, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Government scientists and government funded researchers have so far been less-than-forthcoming in their knowledge and actions, including work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and potential pandemic pathogens."

The witnesses for the Wednesday hearing include Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who has said COVID-19 “clearly” began in a Wuhan lab, as well as Nicholas Wade, the former science and health editor at the New York Times, who has written about the “substantial” evidence of a lab leak.

Also testifying is Jamie Metzl, a former Clinton White House National Security Council member who has long argued a Wuhan lab leak is at minimum plausible and must be investigated.

The hearing comes after FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed last week that the FBI has long believed COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab and after it was recently revealed the Department of Energy now believes with “low confidence” that the coronavirus started at a Wuhan lab.

The assessments in favor of a lab leak are the first movement since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment in 2021 stating that one U.S. intelligence agency, the FBI, assessed with "moderate confidence" that COVID-19 most likely emerged from a lab in Wuhan, while four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with just "low confidence" that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.

The witnesses are sure to speak to those assessments on Wednesday.

Redfield told WHD News last month that the FBI and Energy Department both have “an enormous, powerful, scientific workforce” and “a lot of science depth” at their agencies. The former Trump CDC director added, “I think that clearly the origin of this virus was a leak from the Wuhan lab, and eventually people will come to realize that. … COVID came into man and immediately was enormously transmissible, which in my view meant that it was educated in a laboratory on how to infect human tissue.”

The former CDC director’s comments last month built upon his March 2021 public assessment, which also hinted that COVID-19 was a product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.

Wade, also a former editor at Science and Nature, penned a lengthy essay for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists in May 2021, which helped keep the Wuhan lab leak possibility in the spotlight after Fauci and many in the media had attempted to dismiss the hypothesis.

“The available evidence leans more strongly in one direction than the other,” Wade wrote at the time of the lab leak hypothesis. “It seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS-CoV-2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.”

Wade added, “If the case that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab is so substantial, why isn’t this more widely known? ... There are many people who have reason not to talk about it. The list is led, of course, by the Chinese authorities. But virologists in the United States and Europe have no great interest in igniting a public debate about the gain-of-function experiments that their community has been pursuing for years.”

Scientists consulting with the U.S. government early in the pandemic in 2020 believed COVID-19 originating from a lab in Wuhan was possible or even likely, but emails indicate Fauci and then-NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins worked to shut the hypothesis down.

Wade wrote for City Journal in January 2022 that “the medical-research establishment in Washington” attempted to dismiss as “conspiracy theorists” anyone who had considered a Wuhan lab leak escape but that the unearthed emails were “making it seem increasingly likely that there was, in fact, a conspiracy, its aim being to suppress the notion that the virus had emerged from research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Fauci.”

Newly released emails also show Fauci and others "prompted" an influential scientific paper that pushed back on the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Metzl called it “inexcusable” that there still hasn’t been a full investigation into COVID-19’s origins in a Wall Street Journal piece last month. Metzl wrote the piece with Trump deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, who has been saying publicly as early as early 2021 that the evidence for a lab leak “far outweighs” that of natural origin.

“While Chinese obfuscation and misdirection is chiefly to blame for the lack of understanding of how the novel coronavirus swept the globe, the U.S. could do far more to get to the bottom of what happened,” Metzl and Pottinger wrote, emphasizing that “in the early days of the pandemic, a small group of Western virologists came together to consider the pandemic’s origin. Emails that eventually came to light revealed their plan to push the public conversation away from the lab-accident hypothesis.”

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has continued to deflect from the Wuhan lab leak possibility by pushing the baseless conspiracy theory that COVID-19 originated from a U.S. military base, including as recently as this week.