Senator Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) released a report on the origins of Covid-19 on Monday, advancing the idea that the pandemic “most likely” was the result of “two leaks.”
“This report concludes most likely this was two leaks [including] a lab leak in the September-October [2019] timeframe, even as early as July or August,” Marshall told reporters ahead of the the report’s publication.
“We’ve concluded that [China] started vaccine development in November 2019. And then another lab leak seems to be most sensible explanation,” the senator added. “There are key data points that are being held back that could help us prove that.”
The 301-page report titled “Muddy Waters” was drafted by Robert Kadlec, a medical expert who spearheaded Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership launched in May 2020 to accelerate the development and distribution of vaccines.
READ: The Origins of Covid-19 Report – We must establish additional guardrails on risky Gain of Function research to make sure lethal research NEVER leaks again. https://t.co/XWuT3Ia1Zu
— Dr. Roger Marshall (@RogerMarshallMD) April 18, 2023
The report speculates that two lab leaks occurred within weeks of one another in the fall of 2019 in Wuhan, China, home to a virology research institute. In the months following the initial leaks, Covid-19 cases in the surrounding region spiked.
The theory is largely based on the development timeline of China’s Covid vaccine: Dr. Zhou Yusen, a Chinese military scientist who later died under mysterious circumstances, filed a Covid-vaccine patent on February 24 2020, which suggests that work on the vaccine must have begun at least as early as November, 2019, based on Operation Warp Speed’s timeline. A number of Iranian athletes who traveled to Wuhan for the World Military Games in the fall of 2019 further supports this early-outbreak timeline, the report argues.
There was “[a] noticeable increase of Wuhan adult ILI cases during week 46 (November 11-17, 2019) corresponded to negative influenza testing that same week. This occurrence is similar to the epidemiological outlier identified in the published study. It occurs approximately 13 weeks before the recorded surge of COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in late January, early February 2020,” the report notes.
“Epidemiological and genetic molecular analyses of the early published circulating Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 strains supported the possibility of two spillover events two or more weeks apart,” Kadlec writes in the report.
“This assessment was made based on minor genetic differences in early circulating strains suggesting that two lineages of the same virus may have emerged simultaneously and progressed on different paths or sequentially separated by some period of time.”
“One lineage showing more mutations than the other implying it had been circulated longer than the other or had potentially passed through more individuals.”
In the early stages of the global pandemic, leading American medical experts such as Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as prominent academic journals like the Lancet denounced supporters of the lab-leak theory as peddlers of “conspiracy theories.”
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what’s out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” Fauci told National Geographic in May 2020.
“Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci said.
However, recent announcements by the Department of Energy and the FBI that the lab leak theory may have been the primary culprit of the viral outbreak have raised new questions.
“China has had every chance to disprove all reports surrounding the origins of COVID-19, but they have not & will not. I’m proud to release The Origins of COVID-19 Report, a crucial development in getting to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins,” Senator Marshall tweeted on Monday night.