The top Republican on the Senate health committee said in a report on Thursday that the coronavirus pandemic was most likely caused by a laboratory incident in China. However, the report offers little new evidence and is disputed by many scientists, including those with research suggests that the outbreak originated instead of live animal market.
The report, released by Senator Richard M. Burr, a North Carolina Republican, comes from a joint investigation with the committee’s Democratic chairwoman that supporters of the effort hope to appoint added a bipartisan measure of prestige to a heated debate.
But the findings published on Thursday, while provisional, are only signed by Mr. Burr. And when based largely on existing public evidence, rather than new or classified information, the report disappointed even those who supported its conclusions.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, said: “One can only conclude from situations in which they have been stuck when it comes to their frustrations that Communist Party employees are Republicans and Democrats working on the investigation have yet to issue a more complete bipartisan report. .
Dr Ebright, who was interviewed by the report’s authors, said he supports the argument that the evidence points to a laboratory origin. But the only new element, he said, appeared to be questions raised about how China was able to develop a vaccine so quickly, which he did not find convincing. On the other hand, he said, “none of the information contained in the report has not been publicly presented in the media and discussed in the media before.”
It is not clear why the interim report was only signed by Mr. Burr or when the final report could be released. Mr. Burr and the chair, Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, said in statements that the health committee’s bipartisan review of how Covid first emerged would continue.
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China has attracted interest as a potential source of the pandemic early on. In the spring of 2020, senior Trump administration officials promoted the idea that the virus instead escaped from The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a large laboratory that studies bats, is located about 8 miles away, across the Yangtze River. China now largely asserts that virus of foreign origin.
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Scientists are bracing for a new political wave about the origins of the virus next year, especially if supporters of the Republican lab leak theory take control of committees in the House House or Senate.
However, some researchers who have studied the beginnings of the pandemic have described Burr’s report as a setback in efforts to understand that period.
The report highlights what it describes as gaps in theories about the natural spread of the virus from animals to humans, including the continued failure to identify any animals at the Wuhan market that spread the virus. transmit the virus to humans. It argues that those vulnerabilities, combined with what it describes as problems with safety protocols at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, suggest that the pandemic is “more likely to be the result of a research-related incidents”.
But scientists say it is virtually impossible for Chinese officials to identify an infected animal by closing and disinfecting the Wuhan market before the relevant live animals are sampled. And for all the research interest at the Wuhan lab, no evidence has been presented that the institute has any virus in its collection that could become a virus. cause Covid-19, with or without technology.
“This is a remarkably bad use of taxpayers’ money and resources,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Foundation at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. shy. one of a pair Among the articles published in the journal Science in July pointed to the Wuhan market as the source of the pandemic. “It’s very clear they already have the pre-conclusion they want to come to.”
Dr Rasmussen said that Mr. Burr and Ms. Murray’s assistants asked her how to conduct such an investigation in mid-2021 when they were starting the study. But she said they never followed up.
Burr’s report says it’s based on interviews with dozens of experts. But the 12 scientists who contributed to Science articles published in July said in interviews or emails that they were not questioned by medical committee staff.
One of the studies showing that the home addresses of early Covid patients focused on the Huanan market in an inexplicable fashion. A second opinion suggested that the virus spread to people who worked or shoped there on two separate occasions.
Republicans in the House of Representatives previously released a report that said the pandemic likely started with a random release from the Wuhan lab.
Some scientists said on Thursday that the latest report reflects a deep uncertainty about where the pandemic originated.
“There is no ‘smoking gun’ one way or another, and we may never understand it,” said Sergei Pond, a virologist at Temple University. He added that the “not small possibility” that it could emerge from a lab would inform decisions about laboratory safety and monitoring of hazardous studies.
Others have recently left open different theories about the origin of the virus, but said on Thursday they were confused by some of the claims in Mr. Burr’s report.
Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said it was not clear that the virus came from a live animal market in Wuhan. But he said not being able to find an infected animal doesn’t prove anything.
“There is no way to access them,” Dr. Lipkin said. “They kill all the animals in these markets.”
The report also argues that the ability to spread rapidly from person to person at the start of a pandemic is evidence against a wild animal origin. But an author of research quoted to back up that claim saying it’s false.
The study’s author, Raina Plowright, a virologist at the University of Montana, said: “Many viruses can jump directly from animals to humans without needing to adapt.
