COVID-19’s Origins & Congressional Oversight



COVID-19’s Origins & Congressional OversightThe COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated one of the most devastating economic and public health crises in American history. As of July 31, 2020, over 150,000 individuals have died, the US has the most confirmed active cases and deaths in the world, and the tenth highest death rate globally. The total costs of treating those who have contracted COVID-19 in healthcare facilities is projected to range from $34 billion to $251 billion and will cause insurance premiums to skyrocket. Additionally, the ongoing epidemic triggered the US economy’s most significant quarterly contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) ever, falling 9.5%, equivalent to a 32.9% annual rate of decline, in the second quarter of 2020. The economic fallout of pandemic has disproportionally impacted minority communities resulting in 41% and 32% decreases in active Black and Latino business owners, respectively. Congress has taken a series of steps to mitigate the pandemic's economic fallout through Bills such as the?Families First Coronavirus Response Act,?CARES Act, and?Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act. The?Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget?now projects the US budget de?cit will quadruple this year to almost $4 trillion, and the debt to GDP ratio will surpass 100%. Pursuant to its role as the Senate’s chief oversight committee, the?Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee?(HSGAC) has played an essential role in ensuring that the unprecedented $3.7 trillion of fiscal support provided through legislation is not subjected to waste, fraud, and abuse. Additionally, as the principal investigative committee with jurisdiction over matters of national security, HSGAC tasked itself with probing the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the viral strain that causes COVID-19. During the spring and summer of 2020, under the leadership of Chairman Ron Johnson (R-WI) HSGAC established a research team responsible for investigating where the virus originated, nicknamed Project Origin.Project Origin most immediate task was to probe the conflicting reports about the origins of COVID-19. There is consensus among epidemiologists and public health experts that the virus first emerged in bats and made its first inter-species transmission in Hubei Province, China sometime before November 17, 2019, the earliest known human case. When the HSGAC staff began its research, there were two predominant theories about where the virus originated (i.e., where the first interspecies transmission to humans took place). One theory posits that the virus made its first inter-species transmission in the?Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market?in Wuhan, which sold live animals. The other theory claims that the virus emerged in one of the two laboratories in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses:?The Wuhan Institute of Virology?(WIV), a level 4 biosecurity facility, the highest for biocontainment, or the level 2?Wuhan Centre for Disease Control.The former theory was promoted by Chinese government officials, who initially claimed that the first cases of COVID-19 could be traced to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, initially echoed by the World Health Organization (WHO). This theory is ostensibly plausible. Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was a “wet market,” known for selling meat and fish, many of which were live. It was shuttered on January 1, 2020, which state-run media initially reported as a temporary closure for renovations. Wet markets offer great opportunities for a deadly pathogen to spread because they are places where many different species of live animals are in close contact with one another, and many humans come into contact with these creatures. An outbreak of another coronavirus, SARS, originated at a similar market in 2002. However, tissue samples from the market's animals have shown no sign of the virus. Therefore, it is unlikely that the market was the original point of inter-species transmission. In May 2020, George Gao, the director of the?Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed that animal tissues collected from the seafood market had tested negative for the virus, indicating that the market was the site of an early ‘superspreader’ event, but it was not the site of the initial outbreak.That left open the possibility that the virus originated elsewhere, possibly in a lab. In early May, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, “There is a significant amount of evidence that this virus came from that laboratory in Wuhan.” However, no intelligence reports have corroborated this narrative as of today. According to the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the intelligence community supports the scientific consensus that the virus is natural and not genetically modified. The HSGAC research team abided by this conclusion while conducting its investigation. However, DNI did announce that it was examining “whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.” Some voices within the US intelligence community believe that the virus made its first interspecies transmission to humans in either the WIV or?Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, not as a bioweapon, but as means of showcasing China’s ability to combat deadly pathogens of an animal origin. However, the HSGAC research team came across big holes in this theory. Early in the outbreak, two viral strains of SARS-CoV-2 appeared simultaneously in circulation in Wuhan. However, the strain version most genetic similarity to the bat coronavirus was less prevalent than the strain associated with several COVID-19 cases in Guangdong province. This finding suggests that it is still uncertain that Wuhan was even where the virus first surfaced.Regardless of where exactly the first interspecies transmission of SARS-CoV-2 may have occurred, HSGAC found that if not for the CCP’s duplicitous attempts avoid culpability for the failure to stem the initial outbreak, the pandemic may have been prevented, and countless lives would have been saved. As the virus began to spread, the CCP quickly moved to conceal critical information about the disease. The government delayed notifying the WHO about the outbreak of a novel coronavirus in China. The CCP also blocked the WIV from publishing a genetic mapping of SARS-CoV-2 and forced the closure of a Shanghai lab that publishes viral genetic sequences. This delayed classification of SARS-CoV-2 as a novel coronavirus. Additionally, the Chinese government refused to report new cases between January 6 and January 17 during a CCP political conference and suppressed evidence of human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2. The PRC also refused to share virus samples with the international scientific community. CCP officials have also sought to disseminate misinformation about the virus. In February 2020, the CCP revoked the press credentials from Western journalists that were reporting on the outbreak. The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Foreign Ministry has also made fabricated claims that the virus originated in the United States.In this age of misinformation and inordinate attention garnered by “fake news” disseminated through social media, journalists and public health experts are rightfully skeptical of claims that initially appear to have a dearth of evidentiary support, including claims that the first interspecies transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to humans was in a lab, or that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon. It took over a decade after the 2002-2003 SARs epidemic to discover the source of the viral strain, and COVID-19 will most likely be no different. However, it has become increasingly clear that the initial narrative promoted by the CCP and its surrogates at the WHO regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is specious at best. While it is uncertain if the virus emerged in the WIV or?Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, it is patently clear that the PRC engaged in a campaign of deception designed to obfuscate the origin of the virus in an attempt to avoid scrutiny of its substandard public health practices and escape culpability for its negligence in preventing the global pandemic. As the international community begins to reckon with the virus’s impact and determine what steps must be taken to ensure that a public health crisis of this magnitude never happens again, the United States must demand Chinese compliance with conventional public health procedures and transparency. This undertaking will first entail reestablishing the United States good standing in the global public health community, which has atrophied under the Trump Administration. Efforts must be made to undo the recent politicization of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and renew American commitment to the WHO. While the organization is undoubtedly flawed and has been subjected to Chinese subversion in recent years, the only way to achieve meaningful reform is to maintain our leverage at the organization and re-double our engagement, rather than cede our skin-in-the-game to our primary geopolitical adversary without presenting a viable alternative. In the months and years ahead, as we learn more about the origins of COVID-19, we must not only hold those whose negligence was responsible for the outbreak to account. We must remember that in the absence of American leadership, adversarial revisionist powers that threaten global stability will invariably fill the void. If we indefinitely abandon the WHO and forgo our obligation to global public health, the organization will fall under Chinese hegemony, rendering the international effort to combat future pandemics in the hands of CCP technocrats who have repeatedly demonstrated a complete disregard for human life. Works CitedAbelson, Reed. “Coronavirus May Add Billions to U.S. Health Care Bill.” The New York Times. March 28, 2020. Technology&pgtype=Homepage.Areddy, James T. “China Rules Out Animal Market and Lab as Coronavirus Origin.” The Wall Street Journal. May 26, 2020. , Chris, and Steven Lee Myers. “As New Coronavirus Spread, China's Old Habits Delayed Fight.” The New York Times. February 01, 2020. .“CDC's Politicization ‘extremely Dangerous’ for Americans, Says Its Former Head.” PBS. July 14, 2020. .“China's First Confirmed Covid-19 Case Traced Back to November 17.” South China Morning Post. March 13, 2020. .“COVID Money Tracker: Policies Enacted to Date.” Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. July 28, 2020. , David. “Bat Cave Solves Mystery of Deadly SARS Virus - and Suggests New Outbreak Could Occur.” Nature News. December 01, 2017. , Robert. “He Impact of COVID-19 on Small Business Owners.” National Bureau of Economic Research. June 1, 2020. , Hinnerk. “How WHO Became China's Coronavirus Accomplice.” Foreign Policy. April 02, 2020. .“Home.” Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Accessed July 31, 2020. .“Home Security & Governmental Affairs.” Hearings | Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee. .“House Foreign Affairs Committee Interim Minority Report on the Origins of the COVID 19 Global Pandemic Including the Roles of the CCP and WHO.” House Foreign Affair Committee Republicans. June 12, 2020. , Rafi. “The Coronavirus Didn't Really Start at That Wuhan ‘wet Market.’” LiveScience. May 28, 2020. .“News Release.” Gross Domestic Product, 2nd Quarter 2020 (Advance Estimate) and Annual Update | U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). , Mailonline. “Coronavirus China: Doctor Says Local Officials Hid Outbreak Scale.” Daily Mail Online. July 27, 2020. Gramer, Colum Lynch. “Trump Cuts U.S. Ties with World Health Organization Amid Pandemic.” Foreign Policy. May 29, 2020. , Aruna, and Alex Leary. “Pompeo Says There Is Evidence Coronavirus Came from Wuhan Lab.” The Wall Street Journal. May 3, 2020. .“Where Did Covid-19 Come From? What We Know about Its Origins.” The Guardian. May 1, 2020. .“Where Did Covid-19 Come From? What We Know about Its Origins.” The Guardian. May 1, 2020. .“Where Did COVID-19 Really Come From?” Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. July 26, 2020. .“WHO Expert Believes Wuhan Wet Market Played Role in COVID Outbreak.” Voice of America. May 8, 2020. . ................
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