Covid lab leak theory supported in report from Senate Republicans

The report, while not a formal scientific document, represents a possible template for a future investigatory hearing in Congress if Republicans gain control of the House or Senate — or both — following the midterm elections. The so-called “lab leak” theory is a talking point for some Republicans seeking office, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has promised hearings if his party wins the Senate.

The 35-page “interim” report released Thursday comes from Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Republican staffers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has been probing the origin of the virus.

Although the report favors the “lab leak” origin, it does not rule out a market origin. The report also does not indulge the more provocative arguments for how SARS-CoV-2 entered the human population. There is no claim that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon, for example.

Nor does it mention Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been a frequent target of Paul and other lab-leak proponents because his institute helped fund virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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The report’s conclusions diverge sharply from those of two peer-reviewed studies published in the journal Science this summer that presented the case for the Huanan Seafood Market as the epicenter of the outbreak. One study found a geographical bull’s eye on the market among early cases of the disease that came to be called covid-19. The other study presented an analysis of two early strains of the virus suggesting that there were two and maybe many more distinct spillovers of the virus from animals sold at the market.

Scientists favoring the market origin do not know which animals were infected or where they came from. No animals at the market were tested before the market was closed and cleaned.

“Critical corroborating evidence of a natural zoonotic spillover is missing. While the absence of evidence is not itself evidence, the lack of corroborating evidence of a zoonotic spillover or spillovers, three years into the pandemic, is highly problematic,” the new GOP report states.

Michael Worobey, a professor at the University of Arizona who co-authored both studies published in Science, said the new GOP report “gets the science completely wrong.”

“As the saying goes, when you mix science and politics, you get politics,” he said.

Worobey said the hypothesis of some kind of laboratory incident was worth investigating, and he was among the scientists who wrote a letter to Science in May 2021 arguing that all possible origins should be probed. But he said his investigations and those of other scientists point to…