File photo of Brad Wenstrup, House Select Coronavirus Pandemic Subcommittee Chairman during a hearing with experts from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on November 14, 2024 in Washington, DC.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images via AFP/Chip Somodevilla

The story so far: A U.S. Congressional committee led by Republican Brad Wenstrup has concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of the spread of a virus that likely leaked from a research facility in Wuhan, China.

The final report of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, established in February 2023, was published on December 2, 2024. The report runs over 500 pages and, according to committee members, will serve as a roadmap for government action during future pandemics.

“A future pandemic requires a whole-of-America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote. “We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must.”

The lab-leak theory

The report’s highlight is that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, possibly emerged from a laboratory leak. The report finds this conclusion on inferred or circumstantial claims made early during the pandemic.

For example, it quotes an unclassified factsheet from January 2021 published by the U.S. State Department that said: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.” The report itself does not directly prove the lab-leak theory, however.

The report also quotes previous statements by Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, in June 2024 in support of the lab-leak theory. In one of these statements, Dr. Chan says the virus emerged in Wuhan, which is also home to China’s “foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses”, and that Shi Zhengli, a senior virologist at WIV, “has been researching SARS-like viruses for over a decade and even initially wondered if the outbreak came from the WIV”.

But at a conference called ‘Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Evolution, Pathogenesis and Virology of Coronaviruses’ in Japan on December 4, Dr. Shi reportedly refuted the claim that the viruses she was studying were ancestors of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. She had earlier promised to sequence the genomes of 56 betacoronaviruses she and her team had collected between 2004 and 2021 and were studying. She presented the sequencing data and its analyses at the conference. (The latter have yet to be peer-reviewed.)

The Select Subcommittee report also noted an observation by Nicholas Wade, former science editor at The New York Times, in January 2024, that SARS-CoV-2 “possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family.”

A furin cleavage is the process by which the furin enzyme breaks up specific proteins to activate them. The furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 controls how it interacts with human cells to cause the disease. A letter published in The Lancet in August 2023 by researchers from Cornell University refuted Mr. Wade’s idea and said the site could have evolved naturally, as opposed to being genetically engineered.

What else does the report say?

The report also said the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research at WIV. Gain-of-function research refers to studies where researchers genetically alter organisms to give them additional functions, like enhanced transmissibility or infectivity.

At one of the hearings of the Select Subcommittee, Lawrence Tabak, who served as the acting director of NIH from December 20, 2021, to November 8, 2023, agreed the NIH funded “gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth”.

EcoHealth Alliance is a U.S.-based NGO that had received federal funding and later came under fire for its work with the WIV to study wild animal viruses. The U.S. government suspended the group’s federal funding in May 2024 as the lab-leak theory gained in popularity.

Mr. Wenstrup’s report also criticised EcoHealth for delaying the submission of its fifth annual progress report from September 2019 to August 2021. (Organisations that receive government funds are required to provide annual reports on the status of their research to the funding agency.) The Select Subcommittee report has claimed EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak obstructed a congressional investigation into the matter.

The report also blamed the World Health Organisation for pandering to the Chinese Communist Party and concealing important information related to the virus when the cases were being reported.

Economic losses

The Select Subcommittee also delved into COVID-19 relief funding, alleging “significant lapses” in allocation. The Paycheck Protection Programme was created in March 2020 to help small businesses, individuals, and nonprofit organisations by providing them relief loans. According to the report, the programme received multiple fraudulent claims that resulted in the loss of at least $64 billion.

Another area where the U.S. reportedly suffered heavy losses was the fraudulent unemployment insurance payments, which were valued at more than $191 billion by the Select Subcommittee.

The report alleged the lockdowns during the epidemic spread of COVID-19 in the country were “unscientific”. However, it also praised travel restrictions imposed by Republican leader Donald Trump, who was the U.S. President until January 2021 before Joe Biden took over. It said the restrictions weren’t “xenophobic”, as his detractors, including Mr. Biden, had alleged.

The Select Subcommittee report also said vaccine passports — the practice of allowing people to access most public areas like restaurants and sports stadiums only if they had been vaccinated — lacked “scientific basis” and blamed Biden administration and public health officials for exaggerating the “power of COVID-19 vaccines”.