Senate Panel’s Probe Into COVID-19’s Origin Brings Us Closer to Truth

Did you know that four months before the world had ever heard of COVID-19—on Sept. 3, 2019—authorities in the Veneto region of Italy discovered COVID-19 antibodies in local blood samples?

Of course, you didn’t.  

The deadly and mysterious COVID-19 was around much longer than anyone had previously suspected.  

We now know that fact, and indeed much more, because of the investigative diligence of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

On June 18, the committee focused on the crucial question of the pandemic’s origins—whether the pandemic originated from a viral transmission from an animal in nature to humans or somehow leaked from a laboratory in communist China.

Dr. Gregory Koblenz of George Mason University told the committee that there could be a “definitive conclusion” on COVID-19’s origin without an “independent” and fully transparent international investigation.

Short of a full confession from China or a Western intelligence breakthrough, that’s unlikely.   

However, there is a mountain of accumulating evidence, both biological and circumstantial, that points to a laboratory origin. And the prime candidate for such a leakage remains the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had long been engaged in the genetic manipulation of coronaviruses and which had also been a secondary recipient of American research grant funding.  

The Senate committee heard sworn testimony from several prominent virologists on both sides of this vexing question in an attempt to get a better idea of where and how one of the world’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens emerged.

However, the most powerful testimony was delivered by Dr. Steven Quay, an independent virologist and president of Atossa Therapeutics, and by Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University.

Based on mounting evidence, Quay and Ebright provided detailed scientific assessments of the origins of COVID-19, and their combined contributions on this crucial topic constitute the most impressive account to date on the topic. Both provided the Senate with a detailed description of the critical timeline and the circumstances of the contagion, while Quay offered compelling data and impressive statistical analyses. 

Weight of Evidence

True, certain facts are already well-known. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, barred from U.S. grant funding by the Trump administration at the inception of the pandemic, was a center of risky coronavirus gain of function research; that is, research using “humanized mice” deliberately designed to make coronaviruses more transmissible and pathogenic.

Worse, the experiments were conducted under substandard safety conditions. Altogether, the weight of the available evidence, provided by both scientists, points straight to a Chinese laboratory leak.

Among the scientists’ many impressive arguments, three stand out: 

• The Hunan seafood market is a weak candidate for COVID-19 Origins. While cited by communist Chinese officials and some Western virologists as the most likely location of viral spillover from some animal to a human, Quay told the Senate: “First, the virus was spreading in Wuhan in the early fall of 2019, two to four months before the first case in the Hunan seafood market. This is supported by 14 observations or evidence. This should be sufficient to dismiss the Hunan market as the source of the outbreak.” Likewise, Ebright stated, “Human cases at the Hunan seafood market in mid- to late-December 2019 cannot—even in principle—shed light on spillover into humans that occurred one to five months earlier in July-November 2019.” Both scientists emphasized that no infected animal host has yet been identified that would justify the natural origin of COVID-19 at the market or anywhere else. Ebright added, “No—zero—sound evidence has been presented that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin.” 
• The genomic features of the novel coronavirus are incompatible with a natural origin. Among the many reasons pointing to a lab origin, Dr. Quay noted, “ … the genome of SARS-CoV-2 has seven features that would be expected to be found in a virus constructed in a laboratory and which are not found in viruses from nature. The statistical probability of finding each feature in nature can be determined and the combined probability that SARS2 came from nature is less than one in a billion.” 

Among the genetic features of the novel coronavirus is a peculiar feature of its capacity to infect organisms on its surface. SARS-CoV-2 is called a coronavirus because its surface is literally covered with protein spikes, giving it a crown-like appearance.

It is the spikes that enable the virus to bind and infect the cells of its victims. But this particular coronavirus has what virologists call a “furin cleavage site” among its spikes, a unique feature that makes humans especially vulnerable to this viral infection.

As Ebright told the senators, “SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 800 known SARS-related coronaviruses (sarbecoviruses) that possesses [a furin cleavage site]. Mathematically, this finding—by itself—implies that the probability of encountering a natural SARS-related coronavirus possessing [a furin cleavage site] is less than 1 in 800, P<0.005.”

Note well: In his testimony, Quay cites a revealing email from none other than Dr. Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute to his colleagues that “[t]he furin link keeps bugging me … .” Likewise, in a Feb. 2, 2020, email, virologist Robert Garry of Tulane University outlined his detailed observations to his colleagues: “I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotides that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function—that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature. Do the alignment of the spikes at the amino acid level—it’s stunning.”  

Andersen was the lead author of “The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2,” published on March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine, and Garry was one of his co-authors. Despite their private assessments, they publicly concluded: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

Their paper quickly became one of the most influential papers in academic history. When Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of NIH, strongly endorsed the paper, he solidified the then-dominant government and media narrative that COVID-19 had a “natural” origin. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) “prompted” the authors to write the paper, though he claimed he did not steer them toward any specific conclusion and maintained an “open mind” on the origins issue, recently reaffirming that claim under oath in recent congressional testimony. Nonetheless, despite Andersen’s initial misgivings, as well as Garry’s own stated incredulity of the “natural” origin of the novel coronavirus, they plowed ahead with their publication anyway. Their rapid reversal from their initial assessments remains one of the most remarkable events in the history of the global pandemic.  

• The circumstantial evidence is most compatible with a lab leak. As Quay told the Senate, “There is complete agreement that the closest viruses to SARS 2 are coronaviruses found only in bats from Southern China or across the southern border in Laos. This is 1,500 [kilometers] from Wuhan. The distance from Washington, D.C. to the Florida Everglades. Imagine you are having dinner at a restaurant in North Bethesda [in Maryland] next to NIAID labs. You get sick and are told that the virus you caught is only found in bats from the Everglades, but it is also being studies at those laboratories you see out the restaurant window.” 

Quay and Ebright also recited the well-known efforts of the Chinese communist officials in January 2020 to shut down crucial scientific information and cover up the research being conducted in Wuhan. Even though China locked down Wuhan in January 2020, as Ebright noted, three Wuhan Institute researchers were infected and hospitalized with COVID-19 as early as November 2019.

Fading Natural Origin Theory

During the pandemic’s early stages in America, federal officials and a team of top virologists worked diligently to promote the narrative that COVID-19 had a natural origin and had jumped from an animal—an “intermediate host”—to humans. The problem, however, is that the proponents of the “natural origins” hypothesis have failed to produce the evidence of any such a host before the first human infections.

It was not for lack of a herculean effort. In attempting to prove that the pandemic had a “natural origin,” Chinese officials and scientists took hundreds of specimens of animals and market suppliers from the Hunan market, plus thousands of animal specimens from three provinces in southern China, and many more thousands of specimens from wildlife, including pangolins and bats, as well as from domestic animals.

All were found “negative” for SARS-CoV-2. In detailing China’s extraordinary research effort, Quay observed, “… the largest effort to find a virus host in the history of the world came up empty.”    

In his June 18 Senate testimony, Garry reaffirmed his conviction that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin and remains the most rational explanation for the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the hearing, however, Ebright directly challenged his fellow witness and took aim at the validity of the famous March 2020 Nature Medicine article.

As Ebright told the senators, “It presents no new data and presents no new data analyses.” As he further noted, analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency also criticized the paper because, in their language, it was not based on “scientific analysis, but on unwarranted assumptions.”  

In questioning Garry, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., exclaimed, “Multiple intelligence community agents and components have concluded it was likely a lab leak, and they concluded that at the same time that you and your people were propagandizing the American public and using the channels and influence of the American government to censor ordinary Americans.”

Underscoring Hawley’s point, neither Garry nor his co-authors could have even begun to make a strong, data-driven, scientific argument for a “natural origin” of COVID-19. China had shut down release of any such information in January 2020, hiding samples, deleting the genetic sequences of the virus, and crushing internal scientific dissent.

Moreover, even if the novel coronavirus emerged naturally from an animal, that does not mean that it did not come from a Chinese laboratory. As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., noted, “Dr. Garry has told us that this couldn’t have come from bats. It had to go through an intermediate host. That may well be true … but what he also doesn’t tell you is the animal host could be a laboratory animal.”

More to Come

The Senate probe came on the heels of a staff report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic revealing email communications from Fauci, Collins, and Jeremy Farrar, a British scientist who participated in the early 2020 deliberations among top virologists, as well as the authors of the Nature Medicine article.

There is, however, more to come. During the Senate hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., for the second year in a row, highlighted the continuing failure of Xavier Becerra, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to release 50 unredacted emails, including internal communications between Fauci, Collins, and Farrar, and any discussions they may have had concerning the origins of the pandemic. While Becerra told Johnson last year he would get back to him, Johnson has still not gotten the vital information he requested.   

Washington “cover-ups” are invariably self-destructive. House and Senate investigators are enriching a large and growing public record, while detailing the well-documented federal weaknesses in responding to the global pandemic that killed more than a million Americans.

Such a strong record can provide a basis not only for major institutional reforms at our federal public health agencies, but also the long overdue accountability for those who have deliberately misled Congress and the American people.