Hearing exposes how politics slowed investigation of COVID origins

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in a hearing Tuesday continued to peel back the curtain on the sluggish early U.S. investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

More than three years have passed since a highly transmissible novel coronavirus first emerged out of Wuhan, China, yet key details about the pandemic s origin are still unclear.

The pandemic s earliest days remain in dispute as certain intelligence remains classified. Strong evidence demonstrating the virus gained the ability to infect humans in an intermediate animal has yet to emerge. Some evidence may have been lost to time as the possibility of a lab origin has been maligned as a conspiracy theory for years. Momentum languished for years as Democrats loath to investigate controlled Congressional committees.

Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said in sworn testimony that the intelligence community has enough circumstantial evidence to conclude a research related accident at the city s coronavirus labs sparked the pandemic.

My informed assessment as a person with as much access to intelligence as anyone in the initial year of the pandemic & is that a lab leak is the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, the science, and common sense, said Ratcliffe, who served as the Director of National Intelligence from May 2020 to January 2021.

Yet the public remains in the dark about the full scope of the evidence.

via usrtk.org