On Monday, a new GOP congressional report was released by the House Foreign Affairs Committee minority staff, led by Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul. The 84-page addendum to their previous report on the true origins of COVID-19 highlights how China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is a leading institution on bat coronavirus, may have been the real source of the virus' outbreak in 2019, presenting extensive evidence that may change the international community's outline of how things had transpired since the beginning of the pandemic.
"It is our belief the virus leaked sometime in late August or early September 2019," Rep. McCaul said in a statement that came with the new report, as reported by the Washington Post. "When they realized what happened, Chinese Communist Party officials and scientists at the WIV began frantically covering up the leak."
"But their coverup was too late - the virus was already spreading throughout the megacity of Wuhan," Rep. McCaul alleged. The 59 year old Texas representative urged to "completely dismiss the wet market as the source of the outbreak" and instead focus on the Chinese lab in Wuhan as the primary source of COVID-19.
According to The Epoch Times, the addendum to the report discusses multiple pieces of evidence to support the theory that there was indeed a leak in the Chinese lab in Wuhan, from which the coronavirus escaped, sparking a cover-up by the communist Chinese government. The addendum also highlights "new and underreported information about lax safety protocols" at the Chinese lab in Wuhan.
The updated report alleges that COVID-19 sprang out of the Chinese lab in Wuhan as early as before September 12, 2019 and that "the virus, or the viral sequence that was genetically manipulated, was likely collected in a cave in Yunnan Province, PRC, between 2012 and 2015." It also alleges that CCP officials, Wuhan lab researchers, as well as "potentially American citizens" worked together in "efforts to obfuscate information related to the origins of the virus and to suppress public debate of a possible lab leak."
The World Health Organization, which initially absolved the Chinese lab in Wuhan from any faults during its investigation earlier this year, is now calling for a follow-up probe, which the Chinese officials recently rejected and called "not scientific." Chinese leaders continue to decry calls for an independent investigation into the Wuhan lab leak theory.
Meanwhile, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has spoken out on the evidence he has seen during his time as the DNI leader, saying that he's convinced that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab in Wuhan. According to the National Pulse, Ratcliff argued in a Fox News op-ed that while he had "access to all of the U.S. government's most sensitive intelligence related to the pandemic," he formed an opinion that "the lab leak theory isn't just a 'possibility.'"
"At the very least it is more like a probability, if not very close to a certainty," Ratcliffe wrote. He added that he hasn't seen any evidence that the COVID-19 outbreak was naturally occurring through a spillover from animal to human. He also denounced the CCP's continued coverup of the lab leak theory, alleging that the Chinese government has "gone to great lengths to ensure there is no 'smoking gun''' that points to the Chinese lab in Wuhan as the true origin of the coronavirus leak.
Ratcliffe concluded, "Quite simply, the lab leak theory is the only one supported by science, intelligence and common sense."
