NANCY Pelosi has been accused of preventing an investigation into the origins of the Covid lab leak theory in a "Soviet-style cover-up" as House Republicans call for the intel to be declassified.
GOP members have called for transparency as the Senate Intelligence Committee examines if the virus was released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
House Minority whip Steve Scalise said Pelosi was standing in the way of an investigation.
He said: Pelosi won’t do it. When we’re in the majority we will do it, and we will hold China accountable. They [The Democrats] are covering for China right now.
"It's a Soviet-style cover-up. We're going to keep calling them out on it."
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called for the investigation to be declassified.
He told Trey Goudy on Fox: "Think about who had to pay for this. Three million and eight hundred thousand people have lost their lives because China lied to the world.
"Six hundred thousand of those 3.8 million are Americans. And for so long, with social media denying our ability to even talk about it of where it came from our having from Wuhan and others.
"The first thing we should do is declassify the intelligence. That would show us it came from Wuhan."
Rep. McCarthy touted the idea that the number of visas coming from Beijing should be limited.
He suggested that the 2022 Winter Olympic Games should be relocated and called for Washington to pause funding to the World Health Organization.
Republican lawmakers have long called for transparency as intelligence experts examine the origins of the Covid pandemic.
Legislators claim that there is “overwhelming circumstantial evidence” that the bug came from the Wuhan lab.
Any international fact-finding missions so far have been “stymied by a lack of cooperation from the People’s Republic of China,” the report adds.
The dossier highlighted that China has a "checkered history" with infections caused by research lab leaks.
Diplomatic cables from 2017 warned that the Wuhan lab was "conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses and risking the accidental outbreak of a pandemic".
Other theories summarized in the report include how humans somehow became infected by the virus from a horseshoe bat or “with an intermediary species such as pangolins.”
Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s coronavirus chief, has been under fire ever since bombshell emails revealed that the US funded research to be conducted at the lab.
The EcoHealth Alliance used its grant from the National Institutes of Health to study coronaviruses in Chinese bats and sent the Wuhan lab nearly $600,000 over the course of five years, beginning in 2014.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul alleged that the money was being used for "gain of function research".
Fauci denied that any US cash went towards "gain of function" research – a practice that involves taking a virus that can infect humans and making it either more transmissible or pathogenic.
The messages also revealed that virus experts were warning Fauci that coronavirus may have been created in the lab – a notion that the boffin publicly dismissed.
Fauci even received a message from the president of a non-profit organization thanking him for publicly disputing the lab leak theory.
The doc admitted that he was “not convinced” that the virus is naturally occurring.
Last May, Fauci told National Geographic that there was “no scientific evidence” Covid came from a lab.
US intelligence experts are currently undertaking a review into the lab-leak theory and will report back to Biden in the coming months.
They will be investigating whether the virus jumped from an animal host to humans or whether it was accidentally released from a lab in the Chinese city.
The idea has become increasingly mainstream – months after it was previously condemned as a fringe conspiracy.
The Biden administration has called on China to be transparent in the investigation – but Beijing has urged the US to open up its labs for examination.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Biden isn’t interested in “serious” scientific origin tracing.
He said: "The US side claims that it wants China to participate in a comprehensive, transparent evidence-based investigation.
"We would like to ask the US side to do the same as China and immediately cooperate with the World Health Organization on origin tracing research in a scientific manner."
The Chinese Embassy in Washington was even more scathing, branding the probe a "smear campaign" and part of a "conspiracy theory."
China has always denied allegations of a possible lab leak.
Source: Read Full Article