Jim Geraghty of National Review Online reports on new revelations about the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last week, the man who oversaw safety programs at the U.S. Army’s maximum-containment lab at Fort Detrick, Md., examined the way the Chinese government runs its labs and warned that, “It is very, very apparent that their biological safety training is minimal.” Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee released its full report, detailing the evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology started working on a vaccine for the virus that causes Covid-19 before the rest of the world had even heard about the virus. In this light, it is not surprising that most Americans agree with the FBI and Livermore Labs: The most likely cause of the Covid-19 pandemic was a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
By 2019 the Wuhan Institute of Virology had collected, at a minimum, approximately 20,000 bat- and other animal-virus samples from field expeditions conducted all across China.
After going into caves and other locations to collect the samples and, in some cases, live bats, researchers would take the samples back to Wuhan, where they “routinely underwent initial evaluation in Biosafety Level 2 settings where they were first evaluated, usually by graduate students, for the presence of SARS-related beta coronaviruses. If viruses were present, researchers then attempted to isolate and sequence the virus.” …
… Hawley told the Post he saw “‘imprudent’ lab practices in inspection reports obtained by a congressional oversight committee.”
“It is very, very apparent that their biological safety training is minimal,” Hawley said.
The closest thing to a smoking gun in the full Senate report is the evidence that researchers affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology began working on a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, before almost anyone else in the world had heard of the virus.
