The Republican-led committee of the US House of Representatives, which has been investigating the Covid-19 pandemic and its consequences in the US for two years, has published a report. It says the coronavirus "most likely originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China". The findings are supported by factors such as the biological characteristics of the virus and the disease among researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the fall of 2019.
The report, titled "Analysis of the Post-Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned and Ways Ahead," spans 520 pages. It states that if there were evidence of the natural origin of the virus, it would have already appeared.
At the same time, most of the American special services claim that the virus was not created with the help of genetic engineering, although it is still not clear how the pandemic began. A US intelligence report released last year suggests that the coronavirus had a possible laboratory or natural origin, while the US Department of Energy rates the theory of a lab leak as "unlikely". And no US federal agency believes that the virus that causes Covid-19 was created as a biological weapon.
In its report, a House committee condemned the World Health Organizationʼs (WHO) efforts to combat the pandemic, saying it put the Chinese Communist Partyʼs political interests ahead of its mission to help people around the world and allegedly even allowed the party to control its investigation into the origins of the virus.
WHOʼs technical lead for Covid-19 Maria Van Kerkhove criticized Chinaʼs lack of transparency about the pandemic and said the failure to share information only increased the politicization of the pandemic.
The WHO has created a group to develop provisions to strengthen preparedness for further potential pandemics. The upcoming Pandemic Agreement was also a concern in the committeeʼs report. There they believe that "there were questions about the transparency of the negotiations" and that "the current draft agreement does little to eliminate the shortcomings identified during Covid-19".
The report also criticizes measures to mitigate the consequences of Covid: the requirements for social distancing and wearing masks "are not based on scientific data" and "long quarantine measures have caused enormous damage not only to the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, especially negatively affecting young citizens."
Instead, experts add that such measures were sometimes based on studies of other respiratory viruses, because knowledge about the coronavirus was lacking. Therefore, recommendations may change as scientific knowledge develops.
Along with this, the report endorses the travel restrictions introduced by the administration of US President Donald Trump at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. His administration is also praised in the report for Operation Warp Speed, an attempt to quickly develop a vaccine against Covid-19, calling it an "incredible scientific achievement" that saved millions of lives.
At the same time, the report says that public health officials and the Administration of US President Joe Biden have overestimated the potency of the vaccine, which may have led to low public confidence in coronavirus vaccinations and vaccines in general. There, these officials were accused of participating in a "coordinated effort... to ignore natural immunity and suppress dissenting voices."
Studies have shown that immune defenses are strong after infection but weaken over time. Experts say that Covid-19 vaccines help fill this immunity gap. President-elect Donald Trumpʼs nominee to head the FDA in his incoming administration, Dr. Marty Macari, is a longtime advocate of the importance of natural immunity. He argued in his 2021 paper that natural immunity is superior to immunity after vaccination.
In terms of specific lessons from the pandemic, the report highlights weaknesses in the US Strategic National Stockpile and supply chain and recommends that states build their own stockpiles of emergency medical supplies. It would also help increase domestic production, especially of medicines.
- On May 5, 2023, the WHO canceled the status of the Covid-19 pandemic. An outbreak of coronavirus infection occurred at the end of 2019 in China. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the spread of the coronavirus a pandemic. The Chinese authorities linked the outbreak to the Wuhan animal and seafood market "Huanan": the first patients were either regular buyers or sellers there. Scientists believe that the chain of transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus involved bats, snakes or pangolins (their meat is considered a delicacy in China).
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