GOP members of the House of Representatives are making good on their promise to investigate current and former Biden administration officials over the disputed origins of the Covid pandemic.
Republicans Brad Wenstrup of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky redoubled their efforts to get answers from current and former government officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the controversial lab leak theory.
They aim for Dr. Fauci, who they claim has silenced scientists with dissenting opinions about the origins of the pandemic and the allocation of taxpayer money to fund high-risk coronavirus research, has blacked out.
Even before they took the House of Representatives in the fall, Republicans promised that once they regained control, they would launch a full investigation into Dr.
Dr. Fauci previously headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an agency separate from the National Institutes of Health that directs government funding for research projects such as those at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Representatives Wenstrup and Comer, who now hold senior positions on relevant congressional committees, sent a flurry of letters on Monday demanding that Dr. Fauci, Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Peter Daszak, President of the EcoHealth Alliance, and others for documents and formal statements on the subject.
Republican House members Comer and Wenstrup have renewed the party’s investigation into the origins of the Covid pandemic
While the GOP heads the lower chamber, GOP members chair all legislative committees where they have the authority to subpoena witnesses to testify on the record before Congress. Republicans could also form new committees to investigate Democrats.
Republicans’ efforts to get answers come just weeks after a damning indictment by the US inspector general found that the NIH did not properly determine whether virus experiments in Wuhan involved dangerous pathogens with pandemic potential.
MP Wenstrup, chairman of the select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic, said: “The American people deserve real answers after years of suffering from the coronavirus pandemic and related government policies.
“This research must start with where and how this virus originated so that we can try to predict, prepare or prevent it from happening again.
Government scientists and state-funded researchers have been far from open in their knowledge and actions, including the collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and potential pandemic agents. We can no longer accept years of opposition.’
In addition to letters to Dr. Fauci, Peter Daszak and Secretary Becerra, members of Congress also pressured Dr. Francis Collins, the current acting scientific advisor to the president and former director of the NIH.
The letters followed December’s calls for those officials to provide members with a series of documents and official testimony relevant to the issue of the origins of Covid.
For example, one of their requests is for all the official phone records from November 2019 to date of Drs. Fauci and Collins, various NIH officials, and the Chief Science Advisor for HHS.
Congressmen also asked them to record all communications between NIH, NIAID and/or HHS officials and EcoHealth Alliance staff regarding a $4 million grant to the bat-borne coronavirus organization.
The flurry of letters represents just the Republicans’ latest attempt to get Dr. Fauci on the origins of the pandemic.
DR Fauci is enemy number 1 among many Republicans, especially Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, for rejecting claims that the US funds profit-of-function research.
Despite the denials, the NIH finally admitted in the fall of 2021 that it had indeed handed out grant money to fund gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan.
The role of the British researcher Dr. Peter Daszak (left) facilitates high-risk coronavirus research in China with funding from Dr. Fauci (right) and the NIH are profiled in a report
Rep. Comer said, “Dr. Fauci was warned early on that COVID-19 had markers of an engineered virus, but may have chosen to cover it up rather than blow the whistle.
“We will continue to monitor the facts to determine what else could have been done to better protect Americans from this virus and to hold accountable U.S. government officials who engaged in any kind of cover-up.”
NIH admits to gain-of-function funding despite Fauci’s denials
The National Institutes of Health finally admitted in late 2021 that they funded bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab, despite Dr. Fauci to Congress that no such investigation had taken place.
The EcoHealth Alliance is also a thorn in the side of Republicans, who insist the organization funded risky “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Technology, raising further questions about whether the pandemic-causing virus leaked from the lab.
WIV is now known for conducting gain-of-function research, often engineering pathogens to be more lethal or infectious to better understand how mutations can change their biological functions to become more transmissible and virulent.
Rep. Comer said: “Evidence is mounting that the virus is leaking from an unsafe lab in Wuhan. We know that the EcoHealth Alliance acted as a facilitator, illegally pouring thousands of taxpayer dollars into the Wuhan lab to conduct risky bat research -coronaviruses that could have caused the pandemic.”
Republicans also claim that Dr. Fauci and Collins orchestrated a cloak of evidence to support the lab leak theory, which was largely dismissed by the mainstream scientific community as a xenophobic fringe theory.
However, several reports have emerged in recent years supporting the idea that Covid did not jump from animal reservoirs to humans, but was in fact “most likely the result of a research-related incident”.
This October 2022 report, prepared by GOP senators, added: “The hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt or the presumption of accuracy.”
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Crystal Leahy is an author and health journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a background in health and wellness, Crystal has a passion for helping people live their best lives through healthy habits and lifestyles.
