COVID-19 likely came from a lab, US committee finds
Al JazeeraA committee of the United States Congress has backed the theory that a lab leak caused the COVID-19 pandemic. In a report released on Monday, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis said it had concluded that the coronavirus “likely emerged because of a laboratory or research related accident”. However, the US Department of Energy assessed with “low confidence” in an intelligence report last year that the virus most likely escaped from a lab. The 83-year-old immunologist, who now lives with security protection due to death threats against his family, told the panel at a public hearing in June that it would have been “molecularly impossible” for the bat viruses studied at the Wuhan lab to turn into the virus that caused the pandemic. The panel labelled Trump’s publicly-funded project to develop COVID vaccines – named Operation Warp Speed – a “tremendous success”, but concluded that school closures would have an “enduring impact” on US children.