The US House of Representatives held the first of a series of hearings on March 8 aimed at investigating how the COVID-19 pandemic began. Members of the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic acknowledged that the question of where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus originated is highly politicized. However, they put forward both hypotheses to explain its emergence: one is that it spread naturally from animals to humans. The other is said to have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, and needs to be investigated. “This question is a fundamental question that will help us anticipate and prevent future pandemics, protect our health and national security, and prepare America for the future,” said Commission Chairman Brad Brad. Wenstrup (Representative of the Republican Party in Ohio) said in his opening statement.
But the hearings themselves provided a great deal of political theatrics and provided a preview of the sessions to come in the weeks and months to come. led and invited three witnesses. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, Georgia.Nicholas Wade, former science editor new york timesAll three support the Labourique hypothesis. Democrats invited Paul Auwerter, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland, as a witness.
One focus of the Republican Commission’s members is Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, steering the scientific community to experiment. The idea was to dismiss the leak in the chamber. Early pandemic. Ahead of the hearing, they released a memorandum suggesting that Fauci “prompted” a group of virologists to publish a correspondence in March 2020. natural medicine I concluded that the labourique scenario is not possible.
Fauci did not attend the hearing to offer his view, but in a statement he responded to the memorandum and denied the accusations. He said it was to encourage people to assess the origin of -2. “I’ve said repeatedly that we need to be open about the origins of viruses.”
Democrats, meanwhile, focused a lot of their energy on Wade.They questioned whether he was a credible witness, given that he had authored a highly critical book discussing the biological basis of race. Wade once defended being included as Nature, and the hearing is expected to discuss correspondence published in the journal. (Nature and natural medicine Although they have the same publisher, they are separate entities and operate as such. NatureThe news team, where Wade worked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, is also separate from the journal team. )
Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona at Tucson who has studied genetic evidence since the early days of the pandemic, said: Nature He found the procedure to be “wonderfully unscientific” and not a precursor to the whole investigation. None of us had the scientific record of having published in a high journal,” he said.
change of heart
Republicans’ hunger for answers last week wall street journal reported that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has submitted a classified intelligence report to the White House, updating its stance on the origins of COVID-19. Previously undecided, it now says with “low confidence” that the pandemic likely started with a lab leak in China. However, the evidence behind this change is unknown. Shortly thereafter, FBI Director Christopher Wray told Fox News that his agency had for some time believed that SARS-CoV-2 had accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, but informed the FBI’s view. He said he did not provide any evidence.
Meanwhile, the National Intelligence Council and four other agencies support the idea that the pandemic is of natural origin, which it also considers “unreliable,” two agencies TBA.2021 Aug 8 On the moon, all agencies, including the DOE and FBI, concluded that SARS-CoV-2 was not a bioweapon, but was intentionally designed and released from a laboratory.
For David Lerman, a microbiologist at Stanford University in California, these recent announcements by intelligence agencies suggest that both hypotheses about the origin of COVID-19 deserve serious attention, and both hypotheses are currently in favor. “The laboratory idea, in particular, is a plausible idea but not properly addressed,” he says.
At the hearing, Redfield said he didn’t think the answer to the origins of COVID-19 would come from the scientific community.
Asked about the DOE’s assessment, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning said on February 27: She also repeated messages issued by the Chinese government during the pandemic.
a divided community
Scientists have been divided on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 for some time.Early in the pandemic, in February 2020, some researchers wrote correspondence lancet Condemn “conspiracy theories” that suggest the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab. But over a year later, others, including Relman, published letters. chemistry The group, in particular, was organized by the World Health Organization (WHO) in early 2021 to conduct a hasty origin investigation involving researchers from China. Alleged and lacked all the necessary evidence. .
Earlier last year, Worobey and other researchers reported genetic and other evidence that a large market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were sold, was likely the source of COVID-19. Scientists concluded that these animals may have carried SARS-CoV-2 and transmitted it to humans who worked or visited the market.
At the same time, Lavoleek’s supporters question the funding NIAID gave to the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit in New York City. EcoHealth has partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to study coronaviruses, claiming the institute’s researchers used her NIAID funding to conduct “gain-of-function” studies of these viruses. Some people do. Specifically, critics suggest that WIV scientists engineered coronaviruses to infect human cells at a time when gain-of-function research was banned in the United States.
That’s what committee members and witnesses suggested at the March 8 meeting, and why Fauci, who ran NIAID until last December, wanted to suppress lab leak theories early in the pandemic. . Fauci denied that NIAID-funded research could be classified as gain-of-function.
Metzl criticized the hearing’s focus on Fauci. “China should be the main focus,” he said. “Making Dr. Fauci the primary target would be inappropriately offering the Chinese government a propaganda coup on a silver platter.”
Some researchers have complained that China has been slow to release the data it collected about the early days of the pandemic. In 2021, Zeng Yixin, deputy head of China’s National Health Commission, rejected a WHO plan to further investigate the possibility that “violations of laboratory protocols in China caused the virus to leak.”
But the March 8 hearing made it clear that the political debate would not go away. “I am very concerned that people are guided by their own feelings, intuitions and historical precedents,” he says Relman. For Worobey, it was disappointing that witnesses and committee members were not involved in the scientific evidence.
The committee has not yet scheduled the next public hearing.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on March 9, 2023.
