Democrats’ Glaring Absence from Wuhan Lab-Leak Investigations

I n the wake of a joint WHO-China report on the origins of COVID-19 that echoed Beijing’s line, congressional Republicans have pressed anew to investigate the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — whose potential role in the origins of the pandemic was oddly dismissed by the March study. But although GOP lawmakers have encouraged their colleagues on the other side of the aisle to participate in the effort, Democrats have been reluctant to join.

The Chinese Communist Party has fought strenuously against efforts to get to the bottom of the matter, and the Biden administration has taken an ambivalent attitude toward whether the WHO should more closely investigate the WIV. So the crux of the congressional effort has been to gather evidence in possession of the U.S. government and the controversial EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit-research organization about the possibility that the virus first leaked from the Wuhan lab.

But not everyone is interested in learning more about this. A senior official close to the Wuhan investigation told National Review that, when presented with evidence supporting the theory that the virus originated in a leak from the WIV, Democratic staffers said that their bosses would not be interested in the revelations. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer’s press secretary did not respond to National Review’s request for comment.

The upshot is that amidst a broader push by several members to obtain more information about the WIV and potential U.S. funding toward coronavirus-research projects there, Democratic legislators have yet to sign on to this campaign. This does not necessarily mean they will withhold their support forever or obstruct efforts to get answers; the House Foreign Affairs Committee is slated to hold a classified hearing on the possibility of a lab leak this week. But although WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, CIA director William Burns, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines have said in recent weeks that a lab leak is a plausible theory, congressional Democrats have maintained a conspicuous silence.

The GOP efforts consist of letters and resolutions to acquire classified information and to design a framework with which to investigate the origins of the pandemic. Without Democratic support, however, the push will eventually run into a wall.

For now, there’s still plenty of digging that the GOP can do. Republican members of Congress have trained their sights on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. During a contentious exchange with Senator Rand Paul on Tuesday, Fauci claimed that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had not funded “gain of function” experiments, a method that effectively makes viruses more contagious for research purposes.

His performance failed to convincingly alleviate concerns that the U.S. government funded risky projects in Wuhan, thus elevating questions asked in a letter by Representative Mike Gallagher investigating the roles of Fauci and the NIH in approving and funding such research, as first reported by the Washington Post. “Through National Institutes of Health grants to the New York-based organization EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. government helped fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV),” Gallagher wrote to Fauci. “While this funding was no doubt well-intentioned, taxpayers deserve a detailed understanding of whether federal resources supported dangerous ‘gain-of-function’ research, and whether this might have played a role in the outbreak of the pandemic.”

EcoHealth Alliance is another ripe target of investigation for congressional oversight efforts. The controversial group’s work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been scrutinized for the involvement of its president, Peter Daszak, in the WHO team that traveled to Wuhan and co-authored the joint WHO-China report on COVID origins. As it became clear that the study echoed Beijing’s line, drawing criticism from Tedros, the Biden administration, and others, observers homed in on the fact that Daszak’s organization was the recipient of funding to conduct research at the WIV — a significant conflict of interest.

Daszak is, unsurprisingly, an outspoken opponent of the lab-leak theory, and since the outset of the pandemic has dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as a “conspiracy theory.” As chair of a Lancet COVID commission subcommittee on the disease’s origins, he worked with Jeffrey Sachs, the commission’s director and a Columbia economist who bristles at criticism of the Chinese Communist Party’s human-rights abuses, to push back against the nascent conversation about a potential lab leak for over a year.

The Daszak-led crusade against the lab-leak hypothesis has not escaped notice on Capitol Hill. Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Brett Guthrie, and Morgan Griffith — Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee — challenged Daszak on his opposition to the lab-leak theory in an April 18 letter requesting documents from his organization. “Since EHA is confident that a lab leak is not the cause, we expect you to welcome the opportunity to share any and all information, documents, and expertise you have related to bat coronavirus research at the WIV,” they wrote, referring to EcoHealth Alliance.

In two subsequent letters, the Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans sought from Secretary of State Antony Blinken the release of all documents related to the State Department’s claim in a January 15 fact sheet that the WIV has hosted Chinese military research and, in a letter yesterday, a classified briefing from the head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, after a report that its intelligence division had assessed last year that a lab origin of COVID was possible.

On the Senate side, in addition to Paul’s grilling of Fauci on Tuesday, Senator Roger Marshall introduced a resolution to create a twelve-member committee to investigate the virus’s outbreak. This panel would have a wide mandate to look into the source of the virus, including the possibility that it originated at WIV, and the U.S. government’s funding of gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.

Although Marshall has not yet reached out to Democrats to seek their support for the initiative, the goal, as it is for all of the other COVID- oversight initiatives, is to obtain bipartisan support. Democratic support for the broader push might one day begin to crystallize, but it’s been inexplicably slow to emerge.