House Covid-19 panel releases final report criticizing public health response to the pandemic

Source: CNN Health

Published 10:34 PM EST, Mon December 2, 2024


CNN — A Republican-led House committee investigating broad aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects in the US released a final report Monday summarizing its two-year effort, saying it hoped the work would “serve as a road map for Congress, the Executive Branch, and the private sector to prepare for and respond to future pandemics.”

In the 520-page report, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concludes that the coronavirus “most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” citing factors like biological characteristics of the virus and illnesses among researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in fall 2019.

Most US intelligence agencies say the virus was not genetically engineered, but it is still not totally clear how the pandemic started. A US intelligence analysis released last year said either a laboratory or natural origin was possible, and the community remains split on the issue. The US Department of Energy assessed last year that it had “low confidence” in the lab leak theory. No US federal agency believes that the virus that causes Covid-19 was created as a bioweapon. The subcommittee report says that if evidence of the virus’ natural origin existed, it would have surfaced by now.

Scientists have not found an animal infected with the ancestral virus that sparked the pandemic, but searches like that are not an easy task. It took more than a decade to identify the origin of the first SARS outbreak, for example, and the origins of Ebola are still unclear. However, researchers have continued to accumulate years worth of strong but circumstantial evidence pointing to a natural origin for the pandemic, most likely at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/02/health/house-covid-subcommittee-report/index.html