On Wednesday, May 17, the office of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) released a lengthy report concerning the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that appeared in Wuhan, central China in 2019 and caused the COVID-19 pandemic over three years ago.
The 328-page report, titled A Complex and Grave Situation: A Political Chronology of the SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak, examines in meticulous detail the circumstances and developments in the Chinese biomedical research community and the Communist Party before and during the early stages of the initial epidemics spreading in China at the time.
The lengths to which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) went to cover up the outbreak in Wuhan mean that direct evidence of the pathogen’s origins is almost impossible to come by. However, there is a vast body of circumstantial clues that point to SARS-CoV-2 having escaped from the P4-security-level Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), rather than being a zoonotic (animal-to-human) transmission in a wet market or in the wild, as claimed by state media.
“After years of censorship, there is growing evidence that some type of lab accident is responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. This report, which took two years to compile, edit, and refine, is a groundbreaking look at what was happening in China during the years and months leading up to the known outbreak of the pandemic,” a press release describing Rubio’s report states.
According to the volume, which contains over 1,500 footnotes, the CCP leadership likely became aware of a “serious biocontainment failure or accident, likely involving a viral pathogen,” at the WIV by mid-November 2019 at latest.
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Safety standards at the lab were laxer than they should have been due to demands from higher up that the scientists there maximize their research.
The report draws upon many subtle political, medical, social, economic, and even military developments to suggest how the outbreak may have occurred and caused fallout behind closed doors.
As examples, the report points to conspicuous military exercises conducted at the Wuhan airport simulating the outbreak of a deadly pathogen weeks before the first publicly known cases of what was then called Wuhan pneumonia, as well as a speech in early 2020 by Chinese leader Xi Jinping stressing the need to ramp up biosecurity at the country’s research institutions.
“The WIV was almost an accident waiting to happen, and it appears that an accident, or perhaps accidents, did happen,” the report stated.
The communist authorities, despite knowing about the outbreak for weeks or even months, did not make this information public until late January 2020, by which time SARS-CoV-2 had spread to dozens of countries, including the U.S.
Millions died, and massive lockdown measures destroyed livelihoods and threw people into often crippling isolation — especially in China itself where hundreds of millions languished for three years under the “zero-COVID” policy that was lifted only last December following widespread protests.
