US Senator Mitt Romney (Republican of Utah) stated on Tuesday that regardless of where the COVID-19 virus originated, the Chinese Communist regime cannot evade responsibility.
Romney expressed his views during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, stating, “Whether the virus came from a seafood market or a Wuhan laboratory, China (the CCP) cannot escape blame, as both events occurred in China.” The committee is currently reviewing evidence regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.
He emphasized that “they should be held accountable for this, and they should fully disclose their information.”
Since the virus erupted in Wuhan, China, and rapidly spread globally, the Chinese government has repeatedly shifted blame, insisting that critics look elsewhere in the world for the possible origin of the disease.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government has suppressed whistleblowers and refused to provide external investigators (including experts from the World Health Organization) with all data, all while claiming to be “open and transparent” on the origin issue.
Unanswered questions to the Chinese government include: Did the virus exist in Wuhan before the pandemic outbreak? For how long did it exist there before spreading widely?
Dr. Robert Garry, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane University, stated, “This is one of the many pieces of information that we hope to get from the Chinese government.”
Regarding suspicions of a laboratory leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, external experts are still hopeful to review the research records of that laboratory, medical monitoring records of research personnel, and maintenance operation records of biological isolation equipment to determine if there are signs of accidents or the virus escaping from the lab.
Gregory Koblentz, Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University, expressed that “the Chinese government’s opaque stance on what they know and don’t know makes investigators frustrated because they are assessing both the natural zoonotic spill-over pathways and the laboratory accident pathways.”
Both Dr. Garry and Koblentz lean towards the natural origin theory of the virus. Dr. Garry co-authored an article titled “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in the journal Nature, downplaying the possibility of the virus originating from a laboratory.
Dr. Steven Quay, founder of the clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics, pointed out factors that raise suspicions, such as the Wuhan lab’s connections to the military, deletion of the lab’s virus sequence database in September 2019, and the delivery of several vials of dangerous pathogens to the lab before the outbreak.
Some unique features in the COVID-19 virus genome, like the furin cleavage site in its spike protein, are related to its high infectivity. Some US scientists suggested collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018 to experiment on this characteristic of coronavirus genomes.
Dr. Quay also noted that the SARS-CoV-2 genome contains 8 open reading frames encoding accessory proteins, which researchers say function to prevent infected individuals from displaying symptoms, terming them as “highly unusual” and “highly synthetic.”
He stated, “Based on these features, the probability of SARS-2 coming from nature is one in a billion.”
With no concrete evidence on the virus’s origins, US legislators and witnesses at hearings unanimously agree on the need for stricter prevention measures against gain-of-function research or research manipulating pathogens to increase their pandemic potential.
Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, emphasized the lack of legally binding regulations in such research, crucial due to the consequences and potential survival risks, calling for a change in this state.
Regarding accountability, Senator Roger Marshall urged the establishment of a commission similar to the 9/11 investigation to look into this issue.
He told NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times, “There are too many bright lights here, too many cameras, it’s too political, we need to take this outside of Washington, D.C., to investigate, to prevent something like this from happening again.”