The Wuhan Institute of Virology had a “serious biocontainment incident” in 2019, was understaffed and marred by safety concerns, according to a Senate report on the origins of COVID.
The 329-page report covering two years of work also states that China’s first death from COVID was in September 2019 — two months earlier than first thought — and that Beijing was trying to contain the outbreak from the rest of the world.
The findings include more circumstantial evidence that the virus leaked from the lab, but did not contain a smoking gun.
“A careful reading of WIV reports over a period of more than three years produced a picture of an institution in trouble: underfunded, underregulated and understaffed,” said the report, led by Senate member Marco Rubio.
The report admits there isn’t one ‘smoking gun’ in it – which is most important when judging the question of origin.”
The report dates back to July 2019, when an official from the Wuhan Institute of Virology warned of the “current deficiencies and fundamental problems in the construction, operation and maintenance” of the lab complex and instructed staff to “give priority to resolving the urgent problems we are’. confronted.’
Senate Republicans released a 329-page report two years in the making that contains what they call a “mountain of circumstantial evidence” — but no evidence — concluding Covid-19 originated in a lab
Then, on September 19, 2019, the Wuhan lab shut down its online virus database in the middle of the night, the report said. Six days later, the WIV advised Wuhan airport on an exercise in case of an outbreak of a ‘novel coronavirus’. Days after, a Wuhan resident known as Su died of what a Chinese biostatistician says is Covid-19, the report says.
In October, China’s legislature was reviewing a draft biosafety bill, noting that “the biosecurity situation in our country is currently grim” and that “laboratories that leak biological agents” are classified as a threat.
In November 2019, the Chinese government hid several documented cases of Covid-19.
CCP officials issued a warning report: “Once you open the store’s test tubes, it’s like opening Pandora’s box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace.’
A CCP official traveled from Beijing to Wuhan that month with important instructions from Xi Jinping about “the complex and serious situation currently facing security work,” the report said.
The CCP only alerted the World Health Organization to the outbreak of a virus “of unknown etiology” in January 2020.
In February 2020, the PRC had launched a campaign to strengthen biosecurity at WIV and other laboratories across the country. “Just as Beijing denied the possibility that COVID-19 originated from a lab on the global stage, it warned its own officials about such risks and rolled out new measures to prevent lab accidents.”
Chinese scientists filed a patent for a Covid-19 vaccine on Feb. 24, 2020 — and the report says the “research methodology” suggests they started work on the vaccine no later than November 2019.
“Just as Beijing denied the possibility that COVID-19 originated from a lab on the global stage,” the report read, “it warned its own officials about such risks and rolled out new measures to prevent lab accidents.”
In a February speech to China’s politburo, Xi linked “the political security of the party state, public health and better regulation of biosafety and biosafety.”
“A careful reading of WIV reports over a period of more than three years produced a picture of an institution in trouble: underfunded, underregulated and understaffed,” said the report, led by Senate Member Marco Rubio.
Meanwhile, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology has issued additional regulations to address “a long-standing mechanism to prevent and control biosecurity risks.”
“If central authorities believed that the first human infection of SARS-CoV-2 likely occurred at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, it is unclear why they took the time to address biosecurity conditions… right when the COVID -19 outbreak occurred. at its most acute stage in China and they were urgently mobilizing an all-hands-on-deck response.”
Chinese officials have maintained the lab leak theory is a lie and refused to allow access to international efforts to determine the origin of a virus that has killed 7 million people worldwide.
The report appears to follow along the lines of other intelligence conclusions — with probable but not provable evidence that the lab leak theory, once believed by many to be a conspiracy, is true.
The Department of Energy, which oversees biological research laboratories in the US, concluded in February this year with “little confidence” that the virus most likely originated in a lab in Wuhan. The FBI concluded the same with moderate confidence.