Sen. Rubio drops report on China's COVID origin coverup
Report says China ignored safety warnings and tried to cover it up
A report on the origins of COVID-19 recently released by Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) alleges a cover-up by the Communist Chinese government.
The report, titled “A Complex and Grave Situation” and subtitled “A Political Chronology of the SARS-COV-2 Outbreak,” is heavily footnoted in Chinese references and contains a timeline of events spanning 2019 through 2021.
“This report draws on numerous sources published in English and Chinese to examine the posture taken by the authorities of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) toward biosecurity, biosafety, and public health starting from 2018 until 2021,” the report says. “Its primary focus is on tracing the authorities’ response to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as it progressed from a localized outbreak to a national epidemic to a full-fledged pandemic.”
The report notes that “Considerable information gleaned from Chinese language sources appears here for the first time, shedding much needed light on key questions and providing new context to the existing body of reporting.”
“The implications are impossible to ignore,” Rubio said in a press statement. “Beijing hid the truth. This report reinforces the need to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable.”
The report’s summary says that there was evidence the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “possessed some level of awareness of an outbreak of infectious disease well in advance of the first disclosure of this information to the public on December 31, 2019,” that included a “serious biocontainment failure or accident, likely involving a viral pathogen, occurred at the state-run Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).” The report goes on to say “indirect evidence” shows senior officials knew about the incident “no later than November 2019.”
“Awareness of a laboratory incident seemed to have shaped the CCP leadership’s response to SARS-CoV-2: a response characterized by strict controls of information, obfuscation, misdirection, punishment of whistleblowers, and the destruction of key clinical evidence,” the report’s summary states, going on to add the information was only shared when it was out of the control of the PRC.
“Awareness of a laboratory incident also seemed to inform Beijing’s launch of a quiet, but determined, regulatory campaign in 2020 to strengthen biosafety practices nationwide,” the summary says. “This campaign, documented here for the first time, was not incidental to, but rather was often billed as part of the package of emergency measures that PRC authorities were implementing to halt or slow the spread of COVID-19.”
The summary goes on to say that while Beijing was dismissing the lab leak theory of the origin of COVID-19 on the world stage, “internally, Beijing was warning its officials that the risk of laboratory-acquired infections with SARS-CoV-2 was significant,” and had ordered biosafety reforms.
The report includes safety issues and “hidden dangers” in the biosafety of the Wuhan lab that goes back to 2018 but became “urgent problems” in July 2019.
The closing paragraph of the summary stops short of confirming the lab-leak origin, but says a “substantial body of circumstantial evidence that supports the plausibility of such a scenario.”
More To The Story
RealClear Wire’s article on the Rubio-led report cites some relevant details on the lack of transparency by the PRC, but also the past attacks on anyone discussing the lab leak theory, such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK):
The White House has repeatedly voiced frustration with China for its lack of transparency, and early in his tenure, President Biden ordered the director of national intelligence to conduct a 90-day inquiry into the origins of the virus. The intelligence community, however, was divided on the question when they turned in their findings in August of 2021, concluding that “a more definitive explanation” of the origin of the virus would “most likely” not be possible without cooperation from China.
The administration, as well as the World Health Organization, have repeatedly called on China to share health data from the early days of the pandemic that would further scientific investigation into the COVID-19 origins. The Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did upload some data related to samples taken at the nearby Wuhan wet market to the global virus database but removed it shortly afterward.
A classified report by the Department of Energy, which oversees numerous biological research labs in the U.S., concluded “with low confidence” in February of this year that the virus most likely came from the lab in Wuhan.
Until that assessment was made public, Republican lawmakers including Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton were widely derided for spreading misinformation when they entertained the possibility that the pandemic could’ve begun anywhere other than the animal “wet market” in Wuhan. The Washington Post, for instance, reported in February of 2020 that Cotton was spreading a “debunked” and “fringe” “conspiracy theory.”
Biden also signed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 (S. 619) in March to declassify all intelligence gathered on the origin of COVID-19. The legislation passed both chambers of Congress with bipartisan support.
Rubio’s report follows the April release of a House GOP-led report into the origins of COVID-19 that was titled, “Muddy Waters: The Origin of COVID-19.”
The Muddy Waters report found it likely there may have been two leaks; the lab leak that occurred sometime during Sept.-Oct. 2019 and another as early as “July or August 2019.” The report also corroborates the Rubio report’s findings that China began vaccine development in Nov. 2019, underscoring the lab leak theory as plausible as well as the PRC’s cover-up that would follow.
Last October, The Telegraph UK reported that China began stockpiling Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) between Aug. and Sept. 2019, lending support to the Muddy Waters report’s speculation that there was more than one virus leak.