Senator Josh Hawley Slams Biden Admin’s Latest Report on The Origins of COVID-19

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) panned the report as a ‘complete joke’ and evidence that President Joe Biden ‘continues to shill for China.’

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) of the Biden administration issued a study on probable connections between China’s contentious Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the global spread of COVID-19 on Friday, but eventually chose not to support a definitive judgment on the virus’s origins or divulge fresh material to the public.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO)  called the report a “complete joke” containing no information that was not already publicly available, which fell short of the law’s requirements and indicated that Biden was “continu[ing] to shill for China.”

Hawley’s COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, which demanded that the federal government provide information on how the pandemic began, was signed by President Joe Biden in March. Biden committed to “declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security.” Both Democrats and Republicans went on to support the plan.

The resulting DNI report, declassified June 23, opens with a disclaimer that it “does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses, nor does it explore other biological facilities in Wuhan other than the WIV.”

It notes that different federal agencies hold to different explanations, with the National Intelligence Council and “four other IC agencies” endorsing “natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor,” while the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) consider a “laboratory-associated incident” most likely. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) does not endorse one theory over another, but “almost all IC agencies” agree COVID was not genetically engineered.

“Information available to the IC indicates that some of the research conducted by the PLA [the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, whose scientists have worked with WIV] and WIV included work with several viruses, including coronaviruses, but no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2,” the report claims. “We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic.”

The report concedes that “[s]ome of the WIV’s genetic engineering projects on coronaviruses involved techniques that could make it difficult to detect intentional changes,” and that “[s]ome WIV researchers probably did not use adequate biosafety precautions at least some of the time prior to the pandemic in handling SARS-like coronaviruses, increasing the risk of accidental exposure to viruses.”

It notes that “several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms” that “were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19” and apparently did not require hospitalization. It also cites the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) March 2021 report on WIV officials stating that “lab employee samples all tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies,” without addressing longstanding criticisms of the international health body for uncritically accepting various false claims from the Chinese government. Former President Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw from the WHO in July 2020, but his successor President Joe Biden canceled the pullout.

Politico reports that House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chair Mike Turner and House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic chair Brad Wenstrup (both Republicans from Ohio) called the report a “promising step toward full transparency,” but the lawmaker who spearheaded the effort to force its release wasn’t nearly as impressed.

The DNI report fails to address developments in the case that have already been published, and in some instances appears to directly contradict them. It also fails to allay concerns that the government is working with a clear interest in denying any responsibility it may have for the epidemic.

Since Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) first suggested it in February 2020, the idea that COVID escaped from a Chinese facility has been widely derided and disregarded in public, and for months any mention of it has been denounced as false information. The first mainstream media sites to mention it as a possibility came in the middle of 2021, long after Democrats had retaken the White House.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a previous adviser to the White House on COVID, has been one of the main targets of the controversy because of his backing of the research that may have eventually resulted in COVID by granting funds for the non-governmental group EcoHealth Alliance to investigate gain-of-function (GOF) research, which involves purposely boosting viruses to better understand their potential effects, on corona.

Since then, stolen emails have shown that Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, a former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and other leading scientists were aware of the risk of a lab leak as early as February 2020 but were reluctant to publicly acknowledge it for fear of damaging their “science and international harmony.”

The Washington Examiner reported in March that in early 2020, Drs. Robert Garry of Tulane University and Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Institute informed Dr. Anthony Fauci that they considered seriously their concerns that COVID initially escaped from WIV. Andersen said in his notification to Fauci: “one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered,” and that COVID’s genome seemed “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

In March, however, both signed onto a paper entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” (Proximal Origin), which concluded the lab-leak hypothesis was not “plausible.” Multiple sites have reported that Fauci himself had input into the final draft, which was not initially disclosed. The Examiner’s review found that, from 2020 to 2022, research projects led by Andersen and Garry received $25.2 million in NIH grants.

Former U.S. Army infantryman in Iraq Andrew Huff, a research fellow for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and vice president for EcoHealth turned whistleblower, have also confirmed to the fact that COVID’s financing came from sources supervised by Fauci and the federal government.