The top Republican sitting in the House Intelligence Committee called on the Trump administration’s spy chief to provide info about the origins of the coronavirus in China, including intelligence information related to whether COVID-19 may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
Devin Nunes, sent a letter to Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on Friday, saying the Republicans on his panel “have conducted a long-standing investigation into the rise of China as our foremost national security threat,” and “as part of that probe, we are investigating the outbreak of the coronavirus.”
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His request also included “an explanation of significant changes in Intelligence Community analysis, or the evolution of such analysis, related to the origin of SARS-COV-2, research activities in Wuhan labs, efforts by China to block international investigations of a possible lab leak, and actions taken by Chinese authorities that increased COVID-19 worldwide lethality and economic disruptions.”
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Also, Nunes asked the intelligence community to provide an “exact timeline” of research specific to coronaviruses at the Wuhan lab, as well as a “counterintelligence assessment” explaining all United States engagement with the Wuhan lab on coronaviruses.
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"Among the various theories of the pandemic’s origins, we’ve seen indicators that COVID-19 may have stemmed from dangerous research at laboratories in Wuhan, China," he wrote, in regard to the recent reports.
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It still remains questionable whether the virus escaped from a lab through an accidental infection or if it got its start in nature by jumping from an animal to a human.
“I don’t know of anybody in the federal government with access to all of the information that does not believe that this is a plausible scenario — if not the most plausible scenario,” an administration official told reporters when speaking of the Wuhan lab escape hypothesis last week.
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In 2018, the U.S. Embassy officials in China raised concerns about biosecurity at the Wuhan lab. One "sensitive but unclassified" State Department cable tried to warn about a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory."
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The letter from Nunes mentioned that the Wuhan lab “has a history of mismanagement, poor safety practices, laboratory outbreaks, dangerous ‘gain of function’ research, and other questionable activities.” Nunes told Ratcliffe he would like him to make this a top priority for the spy agencies “given the great variance in explanations for COVID-19 origins and Chinese behavior that we are receiving from government, scientific, and media sources.”
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