A new 329-page Senate report reveals that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had a "serious biocontainment incident" in 2019, was understaffed, and marred by safety concerns.
The Marco Rubio-led report also states that the first COVID-19 death in China happened two months earlier than initially thought.
"The implications are impossible to ignore," Rubio said. "Beijing hid the truth. This report reinforces the need to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable."
The report admits that they do not have a "smoking gun," but they sure have a whole lot of circumstantial evidence that the virus was leaked from the lab!
A careful reading of reports from the WIV spanning more than a three-year period yielded a picture of a struggling institution: underfunded, underregulated, and understaffed.
Back in July 2019, a WIV official warned of the "current shortcomings and foundational problems in the construction, operation, and maintenance" of the lab complex and directed staff to "prioritize solving the urgent problems" they were facing.
By September 2019, the Wuhan lab abruptly closed its online virus database in the middle of the night. Just six days later, the WIV guided to the Wuhan airport for a drill on handling a potential outbreak of a "novel coronavirus." Shortly after, as stated in the report, a Wuhan resident named Su passed away from what a Chinese biostatistician suspects to be COVID-19.
Annnd it gets worse!
Shortly after that, in October 2019, the Chinese legislature reviewed a draft biosecurity law, noting 'currently the biosecurity situation in our country is grim' and listed 'laboratories that leak biological agents' as a threat. And by November 2019, the Chinese government was concealing multiple documented cases of COVID-19.
Once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora's Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace.
Xi Jinping ordered Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials in Beijing to go to Wuhan with vital instructions on "the complex and grave situation currently facing safety work."
The report reveals that the CCP delayed notifying the World Health Organization about the outbreak of an "unknown etiology" virus until January 2020.
In February 2020, China initiated a campaign to enhance biosafety measures at the WIV and other laboratories across the country, and by Feb. 24, Chinese scientists filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine. According to the report, China started its work on the vax no later than November 2019.
Just as Beijing was denying the possibility that COVID-19 came from a lab on the world stage, it was warning its own officials of such risks and rolling out new measures to prevent lab accidents.
To make things even more obvious, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology implemented more regulations to address "a long-lasting mechanism to prevent and control biosafety risks."
If the central authorities believed that the initial human infection of SARS-CoV-2 likely occurred at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, it is unclear why they took the time to address biosafety conditions... precisely when the COVID-19 outbreak was at its most acute stage in China and they were urgently mobilizing an all-hands-on-deck response.
Chinese officials have continuously dismissed the lab-leak theory as a falsehood, stubbornly denying access to international investigations to uncover the origin of a virus that killed millions, shut down the world, and ruined the lives of many.
The report appears to align with previous intelligence assessments, presenting compelling yet inconclusive evidence that supports the once-dismissed lab leak theory, which was considered a mere conspiracy and would get you banned from social media!
In February of this year, the Department of Energy, responsible for overseeing biological research labs in the U.S., reluctantly acknowledged, with "low confidence," that the virus likely originated from a lab in Wuhan. Similarly, the FBI arrived at the same conclusion with moderate confidence.
