A new Senate Republican report concludes COVID-19 most likely originated at a Wuhan laboratory and that the pandemic began earlier in 2019 than China admits, noting Chinese biosafety scrambling and military involvement at the lab.
The GOP-led report found that “the preponderance of circumstantial evidence” supports the hypothesis that “an unintentional research-related incident” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology led to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. The Senate investigators concluded the novel coronavirus was likely already spreading among humans in October or November 2019, highlighting yearslong biosafety problems at the Wuhan lab and what seemed to be a mad scramble for biosecurity equipment at the lab in 2019. The GOP staff also pointed to COVID-19 vaccine efforts led by the People’s Liberation Army at the lab that began weeks before China admitted COVID-19 first emerged in Wuhan.
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The new report, “Muddy Waters: The Origins of COVID-19,” was put together by the GOP minority staff on the Senate Health Committee. The inquiry cast doubt on the possibility that COVID-19 emerged at a Wuhan wet market in late December 2019, as many U.S. and international scientists have claimed.
Flaws at the Wuhan Lab
“The preponderance of information supports the plausibility of an unintentional research-related incident that likely resulted from failures of biosafety containment during SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-related research,” the GOP report concluded. “The identified underlying biosafety issues increased the likelihood that such containment failures were not immediately recognized.”
The GOP report noted the risky coronavirus-related animal experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab in 2018 and 2019. Peter Daszak, the president of the anti-infectious disease nongovernmental organization EcoHealth Alliance, was a longtime collaborator with the Wuhan lab and its leader Shi Zhengli, sometimes referred to as the “bat lady.” Daszak steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in National Institutes of Health bat coronavirus funding to the Chinese institute.
FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed earlier this year that the FBI has long believed COVID-19 originated at a Chinese government lab, and it was revealed the Energy Department now believes with “low confidence” that the coronavirus started at a Wuhan lab.
Biosafety scramble
“It is clear that the convergence of sophisticated coronavirus research, government demands for scientific breakthroughs, and biosafety problems at the WIV appears to have peaked in the late-summer or early-fall 2019,” the Senate investigators said. “From June to August 2019, WIV leadership published multiple reports expressing concerns about biosafety shortcomings due to limited availability of equipment and trained personnel. Multiple PRC government medical and public health entities in Wuhan began procuring pathogen detection instruments and conducting infectious disease outbreak exercises and drills.”
The new report noted the WIV took its viral sample and sequence database offline in September 2019 and that “Wuhan officials conducted an emergency response drill at its international airport” that month.
The WIV lab’s Chinese Communist Party branch in November 2019 seemingly acknowledged problems at the lab when it reposted an article on what investigators dubbed the “three no’s” in its construction — “no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining” a high-level lab.
The GOP report said that “the WIV hosted a special senior leadership biosafety and security training session” in November 2019 as well, with a senior Chinese Academy of Sciences biosecurity official traveling from Beijing to relay “important” instructions from senior Chinese government leadership about the “complex and grave situation” facing biosecurity work.
The investigators said this occurred the same day the Wuhan lab ordered “an air incinerator to address some problem or failure of a biosafety autoclave at the WIV’s original downtown campus.” The report said this “suggests some concern about the risk of an infectious aerosol escape.”
The report also pointed to two patents filed by WIV researchers in mid-November 2019 and early December 2019, which sought to “address the potential for research-related accidental puncture wounds and a failure of high efficiency particulate air filtration for specialized animal-related biocontainment transportation equipment due to possible corrosion.” The investigators said, “These patents raise the possibility of other potential biosafety issues occurring contemporaneously with the initial outbreak of SARS-CoV-2.”
Warning signs
The investigators said China had “faced many laboratory biosafety challenges that were subject to both international and national concern” for years. A State Department cable in January 2018 said the WIV “had a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director George Gao said in March 2019 that “a potential major risk stems from stocks of pathogens stored in laboratories and the absence of adequate biosecurity measures.” And the report said Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV, also “echoed Gao’s concerns” and “specifically expressed issues with China’s biocontainment labs.”
“The WIV’s biosafety guidelines apparently allowed its researchers, including graduate students, to conduct initial evaluations of SARS-related bat coronaviruses in biosafety level two laboratories,” the GOP report said. “At least until the COVID-19 pandemic, it is apparent that researchers at the WIV were working with SARS-related coronaviruses in inappropriate biosafety levels.”
The Wuhan lab “submitted 13 of 17 total patents submitted in 2019 for biosafety related improvements” in April 2019, the GOP report said, including for hermetically sealed doors, decontamination equipment, and exhaust air management. The investigators said the “nature of the issues and problems the WIV was remediating is revealing to their state of biosafety at the time.”
Chinese military involvement
The new report said PLA researchers appeared to begin working on two COVID-19 vaccines before December 2019.
It noted that PLA professor Zhou Yusen, the director of the 5th Institute at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, submitted a vaccine patent in February 2020 and that experts said the vaccine could not have been completed by then unless Zhou’s team began work before the known outbreak of the pandemic in late December 2019.
PLA AMMS Maj. Gen. Wei Chen led a separate effort that resulted in a patent submission in March 2020, leading experts to believe, the report said, that she would have had to have begun research “no later than early December 2019.”
China misleads on timeline
“China’s official position is that the COVID-19 outbreak began no earlier than December 8, 2019. Several data sources, however, challenge this assertion,” the GOP report concluded. “Epidemiological and genetic models indicate that the likely earliest incidence of SARS-CoV-2 human infections occurred mid-October to early- or mid-November 2019. Multiple official, technical, and media outlet reports similarly suggest a late October to mid-November emergence of the virus.”
The GOP report pointed to a State Department fact sheet that found “the U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019″ with COVID-19-like symptoms.
Doubt cast on wet market
The Senate investigators said the “natural zoonotic spillover hypothesis is weakened by the absence of key epidemiological and genetic data from the Huanan Seafood Market.”
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released an assessment in August 2021 stating that four U.S. spy agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with just “low confidence” that COVID-19 most likely had a natural origin.
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Much of the origin search focus has been on the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a wildlife market that was the site of a large infection event in late December 2019.
“None of the samples taken from the 18 animal species found in the market were positive for SARS-CoV-2,” the new report said, adding, “There have been no documented positive SARS-CoV-2 animal samples from any Wuhan wet market. Nor have vendors of these animals tested positive.”
