Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member on the panel, was joined by nine fellow GOP members who announced they had no confidence in the assessment of the origin because the Office of the Director of National Intelligence personnel who briefed them had declined to identify which scientists were consulted throughout the probe, which did not provide a definitive conclusion on whether the virus was transmitted to humans naturally or through a lab leak in China.
"This is fundamental oversight of the IC’s work. We need this information to determine whether there was any selection bias in choosing the outside scientists to consult. We also need it to determine whether any of the scientists had conflicts of interest that should affect the weight given their analyses," the Republicans announced in a letter to Biden dated Friday.
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Nunes, a California Republican, unveiled the letter throughout an appearance on Sunday Morning Futures on Fox News.
“It looks like there needs to be an entire new report that needs to be written, because Republican members on the committee have basically had enough of this. It just looks like this is another attempt to obfuscate and protect China once again by the Biden administration," he told host Maria Bartiromo.
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The interview took place soon after the Wall Street Journal reported that a panel of scientists studying the origins of the COVID-19 virus had disbanded, citing concerns regarding its links to EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit organization that had used U.S. funds for research on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, who dismissed the lab leak hypothesis in March, recused himself from the investigation over the summer.
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A letter signed by 27 scientists, including Daszak, was published in Lancet in February 2020, excluding the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. Various outlets pointed to the letter and to Daszak, who had recruited scientists to sign the letter, to shut down the debate over COVID-19’s origins.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci quietly worked behind the scenes to cast doubt on the lab leak hypothesis in 2020, and he and Daszak were in communication at the time, emails reveal.
Daszak was likewise a key member of the World Health Organization-China joint study team earlier this year. The WHO-China report was widely regarded as a failure, partly due to the lack of access to key data and Chinese influence over the study.
The WHO-China study deemed the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely,” and meeting minutes with the Wuhan lab dismissed it as a “conspiracy theory.”
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