Covid a result of a lab leak: US Senate report
According to Bloomberg, the report is considered an effort by the GOP to put pressure on the Biden administration and legislative Democrats to give the Covid viral lab leak idea more credibility.
Advertisement
Republicans in the US Senate on Thursday presented a study on how the Covid-19 virus might have originated from a lab leak while highlighting the fact that the conclusions still need concrete proof.
According to Bloomberg, the report is considered an effort by the GOP to put pressure on the Biden administration and legislative Democrats to give the Covid viral lab leak idea more credibility.
The inquiry into the Covid-19 virus’s emergence with supporting evidence is still ongoing, but it has become a more divisive topic on a global scale. The conclusion in a Science Magazine article from August, however, that the virus spread from animal to human at the packed wet markets in Wuhan, China, is supported by a large number of scientists.
Advertisement
“I worry because the crowd that is pushing this narrative is not motivated by scientific fact,” Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist, and scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told Bloomberg before reading the report.
One of the interviewees, Dr Ebright, who was quoted in the article, stated that he agreed with the claim that the data suggested a laboratory origin, according to a report by the New York Times. However, the scientist did not believe the report’s queries regarding how China might have created a vaccine so rapidly to be the only novel aspect.
Dr Ebright said, “there was no information in the report that has not been publicly presented in the media and discussed in the media previously.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) and other international institutions and academics should follow the recommendations in the study, according to the panel’s ranking member Richard Burr.
“It is absolutely critical we learn the lessons from this pandemic so that we never find ourselves in a similar situation again,” said United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) chair Patty Murray. “I remain committed to passing the PREVENT Pandemics Act, which advanced out of Committee with overwhelming bipartisan support” she added.
