Senate Republicans demanded transparency and accountability in response to reports that the U.S. Energy Department concluded COVID-19 most likely originated from a Chinese lab leak.
The reports, published by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times on Sunday, revealed that new classified intelligence had prompted the department to join the FBI in concluding that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, China. The department, which was previously undecided on the issue, had made the determination with “low confidence,” according to both reports.
CORONAVIRUS MOST LIKELY ORIGINATED FROM A LAB LEAK, US DEPARTMENT CONCLUDES
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) called for “extensive” public hearings into COVID’s origins in Congress during an appearance Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, citing China’s efforts to “shut people up” when first-world nations questioned how the pandemic began.
“I think we need to do extensive hearings. I hope our Democratic colleagues in the Congress can support that. I know the Republicans in the House are certainly supportive of that,” Sullivan told anchor Chuck Todd. “Look, this is a country that has no problem coming out and lying to the world. We just saw that with this Chinese spy balloon. It’s the nature of a Communist dictatorship to lie to their own people, to lie to the world. But I think that we need to make sure every country knows that and then look at what the consequences could be.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeted that he planned to reintroduce legislation requiring the U.S. government to declassify intelligence on the COVID-19 outbreak. The Missouri senator introduced a bill in 2021 requiring the Biden administration to release all intelligence on the Wuhan lab in question.
“The American people deserve the full truth about #covid origins. No more whitewash,” he wrote on the social media platform Sunday. “I will again introduce legislation to make the US government’s intelligence reports on covid open to the people.”
The theory that COVID-19 came from an accidental lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was widely dismissed as disinformation in the early stages of the pandemic. It gained traction in May 2021 when the Wall Street Journal reported that three employees at the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019, just before the outbreak began. The FBI concluded with “moderate confidence” in a report released one month later that the pandemic was likely caused by an accidental lab leak, and the agency still holds this view.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) — who has suggested the lab leak possibility and called for investigations into the matter since early 2020, months before the virus had reached U.S. soil — was criticized by the New York Times and Washington Post in February 2020 for repeating what both outlets referred to as a “fringe theory.”
“Re. China’s lab leak, being proven right doesn’t matter,” Cotton tweeted Sunday alongside a link to the Wall Street Journal article. “What matters is holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable so this doesn’t happen again.”
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Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) referenced Cotton’s treatment in mainstream and social media while reacting to the Energy Department’s shift in posture.
Cotton, Schmitt wrote on Twitter, “was called a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Facebook put an outright ban on posts related to the lab-leak theory. Americans had their voices censored at the behest of the government. In the Senate, I’ll lead the charge to make sure this censorship never happens again.”
