5 revelations from the House COVID-19 report

By CP Staff, Wednesday, December 04, 2024

This photo, taken on April 21, 2020, shows staff members keeping watch at a checkpoint in the border city of Suifenhe, in China's northeastern Heilongjiang province. | STR/AFP via Getty Images

China, US agencies, scientists 'sought to cover up' pandemic facts

The House panel report suggests that the origins of the pandemic were deliberately obscured by "the Chinese government, agencies within the U.S. government, and some members of the international scientific community" which "sought to cover-up facts concerning the origins of the pandemic."

The alleged cover-up of the virus' early spread and the lack of cooperation with international investigations could be key factors in the slow initial response to the outbreak.

In November, the Biden-Harris administration's COVID-19 response coordinator, Dr. Ashish K. Jha, wrote that Chinese "senior military officers have been writing for years about the potential benefits of offensive biological warfare" and that the "virus might have accidentally leaked from a lab."

Another pandemic expert, Dr. Tim Spector, a professor at King's College London, also reiterated his view last month that "the lab leak is the most likely source of the pandemic" and that "[i]t's looking increasingly like that was a bit of a cover-up and the most likely source of this was a lab leak from Wuhan," according to the House panel.