Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania pressed Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink during a Monday hearing, demanding to know if Kritenbrink had any facts on the origins of COVID-19.
“Americans across the country were ridiculed and vilified for having a difference of opinion. So with all due respect, sir, what facts do you have? Do you have the pangolin where the virus jumped from the pangolin to us, to a human?” Perry asked during Monday’s hearing held by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on “Combatting the Generational Challenge of CCP Aggression.”
“What facts do you have? Do you have any facts whatsoever to support your claim that the virus occurred in the wet market as opposed to the Wuhan lab?” demanded Perry.
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“If you look at what elements of the US intelligence community of said, some have pointed to say they come down on the question that it looks like it was naturally occurring,” Kritenbrink said. “Some have come down on the other side of that and some of them said we don’t have enough evidence to judge.”
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) flagged Twitter accounts that speculated that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), according to documents provided to journalist Matt Taibbi.
On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Energy Department “has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak” in Wuhan, China.
The Journal called this a “shift” for the department. Previously, the Energy Department was undecided and noncommittal about the virus’s origins that has killed more than 1 million Americans and upended everyday life in most states for nearly two years.
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But, the Journal added, “The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory.”
On the other hand, “Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided,” the Journal noted.
The CIA is among the undecided camp.
One of those, who discard the lab leak scenario, is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CDC Director Rochelle Wolensky said in 2021 that a lab leak was “one possibility,” but added that viruses like COVID typically come from animals.
Additionally, Dr. Anthony Fauci, longtime COVID-19 point man for both the Trump and Biden administrations, said last November that he was “open” to the lab-leak hypothesis.
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But that came after years of his dismissing that theory and coming back to the animal transmission story. This month, the World Socialist Web Site reported after House Republicans wanted Fauci to testify about the “discredited” lab leak assertions, that the longtime infectious disease expert “assembled an international team of evolutionary virologists to collaborate on the ‘origin’ question.”
The outcome was a finding that COVID was “not a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The Journal added, “U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position. They added that while the Energy Department and the FBI each say an unintended lab leak is most likely, they arrived at those conclusions for different reasons.”
Republicans on the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) issued a report in October claiming that the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
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