Repugs in the House presented a report on the origin of covid 19. Report dated Dec 4, 2024.
Link:
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/25429414-12042024-sscp-final-report/On page 2 the report states:
Quote:COVID-19 was novel. The brightest scientists and medical experts were learning on the[ ]job to determine how to treat both the underlying disease and the second order side effects.
True enough and inevitably mistakes would have been made especially early in the pandemic. (Pandemic: “A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has a sudden increase in cases and spreads across a large region, for instance multiple continents ...” (wiki))
One conclusion with bipartisan support on page 3:
Quote:1) The possibility that COVID-19 emerged because of[ ]a laboratory or research related[ ]accident is not[ ]a conspiracy theory.
Does not mean that is what happened, of course.
Booby’s favorite boogyman gets a mention (p3)
Quote:1) The U.S. National Institutes of Health funded gain-of-function research at the WuhanInstitute of Virology.
We see that escape of an enhanced virus escaping from the lab is the result the repugs wanted.
Getting into the nitty gritty the report states (p40)
Quote:In January 2024, Mr. Wade voiced his increasing support for a lab incident origin.14 Mr.Wade astutely noted that “SARS2 possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871[ ]known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary[ ]evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family.”15 With the natural evolution of a furin[ ]cleavage site being nonexistent, Mr. Wade further noted that EcoHealth and the WIV’s DEFUSEproposal, which was rejected by DARPA, sought to do what nature had not been ever known todo—insert a furin cleavage site into a SARS2 virus.16 It is, therefore, more than just a[ ]coincidence that COVID-19 emerged from the city with a lab preparing to conduct this research[ ]under cost-effective yet risky BSL-2 protocols.17
The wet market as origin is discounted in the report:
Quote:Fourth, the evidence supporting that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan[ ]Seafood Market in Wuhan is tenuous.26 Dr. Chan points of that “the existing genetic and early[ ]case data show that all known COVID-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of[ ]SARS-CoV-2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the[ ]virus had already been circulating in humans.”27 Furthermore, no infected animal has been[ ]verified at the Wuhan market or its supply chain.28
Ummm, there were TWO separate varieties of the covid19 virus, labelled A and B, not many samples were intermediate—so TWO releases of the virus from the lab? And the wet market was closed and live animals removed.
Also the first cases were all from people who worked or shopped at the wet market.
However, the killer evidence the committee found was “the natural evolution of a furin[ ]cleavage site being nonexistent.”
Now, was going to explain what a cleavage site was in DNA—gets complicated immediately. Not essential anyway. Will just post this:
Quote:SARS-CoV-2 entry requires sequential cleavage of the spike glycoprotein at the S1/S2 and the S2ʹ cleavage sites to mediate membrane fusion. SARS-CoV-2 has a polybasic insertion (PRRAR) at the S1/S2 cleavage site that can be cleaved by furin.27 Apr 2021
The furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is ...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-wNow, the lab origin theory requires that the furin cleavage site was artificially created. Unfortunately for the theory:
Quote:Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses
Yiran Wu a
,
Suwen Zhao
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165So the presence of furin cleavage sites in corona viruses happens naturally and this report by the HoR subcommittee fails to make the case the covid19 virus has an artificial origin.