The United States congressional subcommittee’s final report on the Covid-19 pandemic has pointed to the “lab leak” theory,  making it the latest US report pinning the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to the Wuhan lab in China.

“Four years after the onset of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis,” the 500-plus page report said, adding that since they began their work in February 2023, more senior intelligence officials, politicians, science editors, and scientists had “endorsed the hypothesis that COVID-19 emerged as the result of a laboratory or research related accident.”

The report comes ahead of Donald Trump being sworn-in as the next US President, in January. Incidentally, Trump was among the earliest to point to the “lab leak” theory, and his pick to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH) - Jay Bhattacharya, had protested measures taken during the peak of the pandemic, including the lockdown and vaccine mandates.

The report outlines NIH “failures” includingprocedures for funding and overseeing potentially dangerous research that “are deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security.”

Gain-of-function research

The report points to Covid-19 pandemic origins as “including but not limited to the Federal Government’s funding of Gain-of-Function Research”.

“The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature,” a note on the report said. (Gain-of-function research involves modifying  the function of organisms). Besides, all data showed COVID-19 cases stemmed from a single introduction into humans. “This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events,” it added.

Further, it points out, “Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.” And researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology “were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.”  Besides, “by nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced,” it adds.

In March 2023, the FBI had tweeted confirming “the Bureau has assessed that the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated from a lab incident in Wuhan, China.” It was quoting from an interview its Director had with an American media outlet. And days before that, the US Department of Energy had reportedly also alluded to the “lab leak” theory.  

Vaccines and immunity

Several actions undertaken during the pandemic including social distancing, mask mandates and the lockdown have come in for criticism, and so has the World Health Organization. The report also called out “rushed Covid-19 vaccine approvals” and “coordinated effort to ignore natural immunity — which is acquired through previous COVID-19 infection — when developing vaccine guidance and mandates.”

The WHO’s response to the pandemic “was an abject failure because it caved to pressure from the Chinese Communist Party and placed China’s political interests ahead of its international duties,” the report said, adding that the “Pandemic Treaty” being presently negotiated internationally “may harm the United States.”

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