Republican-led U.S. Congressional report findings on COVID’s origins explained

The story so far: A U.S. Congressional committee led by Republican Brad Wenstrup has concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of the spread of a virus that likely leaked from a research facility in Wuhan, China. For example, it quotes an unclassified factsheet from January 2021 published by the U.S. State Department that said: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.” The report itself does not directly prove the lab-leak theory, however. In one of these statements, Dr. Chan says the virus emerged in Wuhan, which is also home to China’s “foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses”, and that Shi Zhengli, a senior virologist at WIV, “has been researching SARS-like viruses for over a decade and even initially wondered if the outbreak came from the WIV”. The Select Subcommittee report also noted an observation by Nicholas Wade, former science editor at The New York Times, in January 2024, that SARS-CoV-2 “possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family.” A furin cleavage is the process by which the furin enzyme breaks up specific proteins to activate them. The Select Subcommittee report also said vaccine passports — the practice of allowing people to access most public areas like restaurants and sports stadiums only if they had been vaccinated — lacked “scientific basis” and blamed Biden administration and public health officials for exaggerating the “power of COVID-19 vaccines”.