BREAKING: New US Senate report concludes COVID-19 virus originated in Chinese lab" title="BREAKING: New US Senate report concludes COVID-19 virus originated in Chinese lab" />

A new report released by the US Senate has concluded that the COVID-19 virus, known as SARS-CoV-2, originated in a Chinese laboratory but was inadvertently leaked.

The 301-page report, prepared by a team that included Dr. Robert Kadlec, a former government health official who played a key role in the development of vaccines against COVID-19, and staff from the Committee on Health, Education , United States Senate Labor and Pensions. , was released April 17 by Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Ky.), a member of the Senate Health Committee, who chairs the Subcommittee on Primary Health Care and Retirement Security.

The report states that “the preponderance of information supports the plausibility of an unintentional research-related incident that likely resulted from biosecurity containment failures during SARS-CoV-2 vaccine-related research “.

The researchers who carried out the report started with two hypotheses: one was that the virus originated in animals before spilling over to humans, known as a natural origin, and the other was a leak from the Institute of Virology of Wuhan (WIV), located in the same city where the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in late 2019.

According to the report, Kadlec’s team of consultants spent approximately 18 months investigating the origins of COVID-19 and concluded that the available evidence supports a laboratory leak. The report suggests that there may have been an aerosol leak that caused an infection of laboratory personnel, or that the virus may have been released into the outside environment due to biocontainment failures. One theory mentioned in the report revolves around cleaning agents causing weld seam corrosion in the lab, as mentioned in several 2019 lab improvement papers.

The report also highlights concerns about biosecurity in the WIV that have been raised by both domestic and foreign bodies for years. A 2018 U.S. State Department cable, for example, reported that the then-opened biosecurity level four lab at the facility had a “severe shortage” of technicians trained to operate the lab safely Lab researchers, before the pandemic, reported experimenting with mice, bats and palm civets to find coronaviruses that were more capable of infecting humans, and sometimes experimented with conditions below biosafety level four .

The report also points to Chinese reports, communications and warnings as support for the lab leak theory, including an attempt in November 2019 to get an air incinerator at the lab, which suggested “some concern about the risk of ‘escape from infectious aerosols’. The report also noted that WIV staff underwent a biosecurity training course that same month.

Additionally, the report concludes that features of SARS-CoV-2 suggest that the virus was man-made, including the presence of a furin cleavage site at the same site that was proposed in a grant by EcoHealth Alliance, an organization that funneled US taxpayer money to scientists in Wuhan.

While the exact origin of the COVID-19 virus continues to be debated, this new Senate report adds to the growing body of evidence supporting the probable origin of SARS-CoV-2 as a laboratory leak from the Institute of Wuhan Virology.

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