GOP report ties COVID origins to China's bioweapons program

[Elderberry]

WND 12/15/2022

Challenges assessment of U.S. intelligence community

A report by Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence concludes there are "indications" the COVID-19 pandemic is tied to China’s biological weapons research program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus, which the lawmakers believe was engineered at the lab, "spilled over" to the general human population during an incident, the minority staff report says, according to Fox News Digital.

The report contradicts a declassified assessment on the origins of COVID-19 by the Biden administration's Office of the Director of National Intelligence in October 2021 stating SARS-CoV-2 was "probably not a biological weapon."

The House Republicans directly address the DNI report.

"Contrary to the implication of the [Intelligence Community's] declassified report, based on our investigation involving a variety of public and non-public information, we conclude that there are indications that SARS-CoV-2 may have been tied to China’s biological weapons research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology," a summary of the report states.

"The IC failed to adequately address this information in its classified Updated Assessment. When we attempted to raise the issues with the IC, it failed to respond."

Hillary Clinton, when she was secretary of state, warned in a cable to French officials that research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology could lead to a "biological weapons proliferation concern."

More: https://www.wnd.com/2022/12/gop-report-ties-covid-origins-chinas-bioweapons-program/

[EdinVA]

And the NIH paid for the research.... damn we are stupid...

[catfish1957]

If someone would have told me 20 years ago that our public health sector would sell us out for poltical ideology, politcal capital  and financial gain,  I'd said you were crazy.

I truly believe our government is our worst enemy.

[DefiantMassRINO]

Playing God with dangerous pathogens ... what could possibly go wrong?

[Smokin Joe]

Once more, with feeling....

The virus was invented in Chapel Hill, North Carolina by a team working on enhanced viruses. They created the chimera virus our of the spike protein from a Bat coronavirus and a SARS virus backbone, back in 2014.
They then wrote to the journal Nature, bragging on their success at creating this new virus, describing its effects and resistance to known antivirals, in 2015.

Two of the researchers on that team (Xing-Yi Ge and Zhengli-Li Shi) were from the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens and Biosafety, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, China.

The research was moved from the US after Gain of Function research was banned in 2014, and it doesn't take much to connect those dots.

From the Abstract (pre-COVID), which was rewritten a mite after the pandemic got under way:

Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.

Original Article link:https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

They are only telling part of the story, and that just is not the whole truth.