Covid ‘most likely’ leaked from lab, explosive Senate says

The Covid pandemic was most likely the result of a lab leak, according to an explosive Senate report.

Policymakers said ‘substantial’ evidence pointing to a research accident has emerged while evidence for a natural spillover ‘is missing’.

The interim report concluded that China ‘s unwillingness to cooperate or open up the lab in question meant it ‘no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt’.

GOP members of the Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions reviewed hundreds of studies into the origins of Covid and interviewed ‘several dozen’ experts over the past 15 months.

Writing in the report, they conclude: ‘Based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.’

They add: ‘Nearly three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, critical evidence that would prove that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and resulting COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a natural zoonotic spillover is missing.’

The report accepts there is still crucial missing information about how the pandemic truly came to be — with no direct evidence for either natural or synthetic origin.

But ‘the lack of transparency and collaboration’ from China ‘prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion’, the senate committee adds.

The Covid pandemic was most likely the result of a lab leak, according to an explosive Senate report

Pictured: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where crucial data was wiped by Chinese scientists

The question of whether the global outbreak began with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market or leaked out of the Wuhan lab just eight miles across the Yangtze River has given rise to fierce debate about how to prevent the next pandemic. New studies point to a natural spillover at the Huanan wildlife market. Positive swab samples of floors, cages and counters also track the virus back to stalls in the southwestern corner of the market (bottom left), where animals with the potential to harbor Covid were sold for meat or fur at the time (bottom right)

The report, chaired by North Carolina GOP Senator Richard Burr, highlights there is some indirect evidence that Covid emerged naturally.

Policymakers point out that a third of Covid cases were linked back to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan – an animal slaughter market where exotic animals were kept in squalid conditions.

A series of studies published earlier this year appeared to trace the first cluster of cases back to one specific corner of the wet market, where animals known to harbor Covid including raccoon dogs, hedgehogs, rats and squirrels were kept.

Chinese scientists also found positive samples of an ancestral Covid strain on floors, counters and equipment in the market. 

But to date ‘there is no published genetic evidence that Covid was circulating in animals prior to the start of the pandemic’, the Senate report says.

And the Republicans claim the samples collected from the market’s stalls are too similar to the virus that circulated in humans to have been shed by animals.