WASHINGTON (CN) — For some House Republicans investigating the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has nearly become a forgone conclusion that the novel virus sprang from an infectious disease laboratory.
“While the specific origin of Covid-19 may not be 100% clear, there’s mounting evidence suggesting a research- or lab-related leak,” Ohio Congressman Brad Wenstrup said during a hearing Monday in a specialized panel on House Committee on Oversight aimed at investigating such claims.
“Starting in early 2020, there were rumblings about the possibility that Covid-19 came from a lab,” said Wenstrup, a Republican who chairs the subcommittee. “Ever since then, more and more circumstantial evidence has come to light suggesting that this is the case.”
The U.S. intelligence community has yet to give a firm assessment about whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab — specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China — or if it jumped from an animal source to humans at a wet market in the same region. In recent months, however, several federal agencies including the FBI and the Department of Energy have released reports that rank a lab leak as one possible origin of the virus.
Despite that discord, some of the former intelligence officials invited to testify Monday by the Republican-led committee were adamant that the lab-leak theory is viable. They said the evidence supporting this hypothesis faces resistance from some within the government have worked to downplay any.
“My informed assessment, as a person with as much access to anyone to our government’s intelligence during the initial year of the pandemic, has been and continues to be that that the lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, by science and by common sense,” said John Ratcliffe, who was director of national intelligence at the end of the Trump administration when the pandemic began.
Having represented Texas in the House before his 2020 cabinet-level appointment, Ratcliffe contended that evidence he collected during his time as head of the U.S. intelligence community provided more solid support to the lab-leak theory than the suggestion that humans contracted Covid-19 naturally from animals.
Why agencies like the CIA have not been able to make a firm assessment of the virus’s origins stumped Ratcliffe. “I find that unjustifiable,” he said, “and in reflection, it’s not that the agency can’t make an assessment with any confidence, but they won’t.” Ratcliffe suggested that the Biden administration does not want to face what he called the enormous geopolitical implications of acknowledging that Covid-19 originated from a lab in China.
Another Trump-era official invited to testify for Republicans about the lab-leak theory was David Feith, former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Feith emphasized the threat to international security posed by a lab leak.
“If [Covid-19] emerged naturally, that implies certain things about human interactions with nature where the risks are sizable enough,” Feith testified. “But if it emerged from a lab, particularly one conducting gain-of-function biology experiments with technologies invented only a few years ago, this is akin to a Hiroshima event revealing new and modern high-tech risks to human civilization and even our species.”
Gain-of-function research refers to a type of testing aimed at increasing a virus’s transmissibility or severity. There has yet to be any conclusive evidence to prove that such research was being done in Wuhan, but proponents of the lab-leak theory, including some congressional Republicans, have suggested that it was done in part with U.S. government funding.
Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the president, told Congress in May 2021 that no gain-of-function research took place in Wuhan.
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