House Covid-19 panel releases final report criticizing public health response to the pandemic
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.
In the new report, the subcommittee also faulted the pandemic efforts of the World Health Organization, saying it placed the political interests of the Chinese Communist Party ahead of its mission to help people around the world and even allowed the party to control its investigation into the virus’ origins.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead, has criticized China’s lack of transparency over the pandemic. “The lack of data disclosure is simply inexcusable. The longer it takes to understand the origins of the pandemic, the harder it becomes to answer the question, and the more unsafe the world becomes,” she wrote in an editorial last year, and acknowledged that this failure to share information has only fueled the politicization of the virus.
WHO has established a panel to draft provisions aimed at strengthening a framework for future pandemics, but the new House subcommittee report expresses concerns about the future of the so-called Pandemic Treaty. “There have been questions about the transparency of the negotiations,” it says, and the existing draft of the treaty “does little to address any of the shortfalls revealed in COVID-19.” Any US iteration of the treaty must be approved by the Senate, the report says.
moar cover-ups and lies and wasted tax payer money.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/house-covid-19-panel-releases-033433661.html