[Wash Times] Two leaks from Chinese labs in fall 2019 are the most likely sources of the coronavirus’ spread among humans, a Senate report concluded after an 18-month investigation into how the COVID-19 pandemic began — a thorny question that has stumped two administrations and fueled rancor between Washington and Beijing.Sen. Roger Marshall, Kansas Republican, circulated the report. The weight of evidence shows that the pandemic was caused by unintentional lab incidents in Wuhan, China, as far back as October 2019. The virus swept through the central Chinese city before emerging as a global concern by January 2020.
"Based on the publicly available evidence, it appears Wuhan is the only location where SARS-CoV-2 spilled over into humans," said the report, using the formal name for the virus that causes COVID-19 disease. "The low genetic diversity of earliest SARS-CoV-2 samples suggests that [the] COVID-19 pandemic is most likely the result of one or possibly two successful introductions of SARS-CoV-2. Additionally, these estimates indicate that the initial introduction may have occurred on or about November 18 and a second within weeks of the first."
Dr. Robert Kadlec, who played a crucial role in Operation Warp Speed to develop a COVID-19 vaccine during the Trump administration, prepared the report.
The 300-page document undercuts Beijing’s official position that the outbreak began in December 2019 and says the Chinese Communist Party started to develop a vaccine after the first leak, which went unnoticed outside China, and before the global surge of COVID-19 cases in early 2020.
Dr. Zhou Yusen, a Chinese military scientist, filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine on Feb. 24, 2020, that would have required weeks of work to sequence the new virus, according to the report.