house republicans on the select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis hosted a discussion with doctors and scientists about the origins of covid-19.

the subcommittee is controlled by democrats and house minority whip steve scalise said republicans decided to host the discussion because they claimed democrats are not adequately looking into whether the chinese communist party is to blame for the virus. >> good afternoon, everybody. thank you for coming. i want to thank our witnesses as well. this is something we've been wanting to do for a long time, which is have a hearing on the origins of covid-19. there will be opening statements, and then we have to witness panels that will be presenting evidence, and we will have q&as sessions. we will do at least one or two

rounds if necessary. i will give my opening statement. 4 million people around the globe have died from covid-19. 600,000 of those deaths are here in america. with every one of those deaths, there are still families and loved ones who are also mourning. the entire world has been turned upside down. our children have lost a year of their livelihoods. millions of those children lost an irreplaceable year of in a classroom learning. governments have borrowed trillions of dollars responding to this pandemic. we have a simple, basic question. how did covid-19 start? what was the origin of covid-19? we've asked that question for more than a year and requested the house majority hold hearings to investigate the origins of covid-19. perplexing lee, speaker pelosi

has refused to allow a single hearing, calling it a diversion. as the american people will hear today from expert witnesses, this is far from a diversion. the evidence continues mounting that this was a man made disaster that started in the wuhan lab. and if that's the case, then it might be considered dramatically worse than chernobyl. today's witnesses layout to specific facts. one, the chinese government engaged in a series of lies, followed by a massive cover-up from the very start of covid. number two, the weight of evidence strongly points to the virus having emerged from the wuhan lab. let me start with the lie, and you will hear more from the ranking members. on january 2nd, 2020, doctor fauci and -- picked up from the chinese

communist party the first official live, with the ccp claiming that and each of the 27 reported cases, the illness had jumped from an animal to a human. both doctors fauci and redfield knew that was likely not true. we know with overwhelming certainty, that was a lie. a year and a half later, there is not a single case of the virus having jumped from an animal to human. yet, the ccp claimed to know of 27 separate individual cases. the chinese communist party was covering up knowledge of human to human transmission. on january 7th, the cdc situation reporting concluded quote media has begun to report high demand of and 90 respirators and china. you don't need and 95 respirators to protect against individual animal to human transmission. china knew the virus was

spreading from humans to other humans. on january 4th of 2020, doctor redfield offered to send the cdc epidemic intelligence service to wuhan. had china been open and transparent with the world, the pandemic could have been stopped right then and there. instead weeks later, trying to put people from wuhan on international flights, spreading the disease globally. throughout january of 2020, there were 20,000 people from china who are entering the united states daily. exponentially worse than chernobyl. on january 6th, doctor redfield -- the cdc. and reported to the u.s. national security adviser that his quote, call was bill was traveling and bizarre. china was stonewalling, he went on to say. he was not forthcoming is. all this was doctor redfield back and january of 2020.

redfield was concerned by gaom's tone which said that it was different than his previous experience with him as gao santa like a hostage. on january 10th, the united states began work on a vaccine. let me pause there for a moment because it shows a dramatic dichotomy between our two nations. and the critical first days, china was engaging in a massive cover-up while in allowing the virus to spread across the globe. and at the same time, the united states was beginning work on a life saving vaccine. the story matters and it is a display to the world about the two countries characters. the morals and the values. by january 13th, doctor fauci concluded quote, holy -- that was his quote in january 2020. what was their motive? was it to cover up a virus that

lead from a lab and gain gain a function research from the lab on coronavirus research. making the virus dramatically more dangerous to the world than a naturally occurring coronavirus, that might be a motive for a massive government cover-up. our witnesses will discuss this further, but here is what we know today. one, no intermediate hosts, the animal that the bat would be expected to infect that would then transmit the virus to humans has been found after testing by the way hundreds of different species and thousands of specific animals still have not found that animal. 2, there is no evidence that it was ever in the human community before the pandemic began and yet as doctor -- will be discussing, it had projected human to human spread from the very beginning. that is the hallmark of a lab created virus. and number three we know that that wuhan lab was conducting particularly dangerous research

on that coronavirus, which could cause pandemics, included gain a function research. as admiral gerard states, quote, it is just too much of a coincidence that a worldwide pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus that cannot be found in nature started just a few miles away from a secretive laboratory doing potentially dangerous research on a bat coronaviruses. we also know that the first cases of covid in china occurred sometime between mid october to mid of ember of 2019. this is when we now know that according to the wall street journal, three wuhan lab workers sought hospital care for an unknown respiratory illness. covid did not start in late december in the wet markets. it started months earlier, and lab workers and the institute working on coronavirus were infected. and china began lying. immediately, and began buying up and 95 respirators

immediately. and they closed domestic travel but continued sending 20,000 people today to america. and now, 600,000 americans are dead, and 4 million people worldwide. this is exponentially worse than chernobyl. and yet, to this day, speaker pelosi has yet to have a single hearing on the origin of covid-19. the very nature -- the very name of our committee is the select subcommittee on the coronavirus. and yet, not a single hearing on the origin of the coronavirus. well, that changes today. the american people will learn a lot about what we know, the willingness -- the witnesses are respected, serious experts who have put time and research into learning more about the origins of covid-19. but we should be having a bipartisan investigation that would include subpoena power to bring others in. and nih doctor fauci should testify on the nih's history on

gain a function. speaker pelosi should take up the bill that passed unanimously out of the senate. that would declassify all intelligence related to the origins of covid. think about this, there's a bill that passed the senate unanimously, all republicans, all democrats, to declassify some of the things that we're trying to find out. speaker pelosi has yet to bring that up, and were calling on her to bring that up and to pass this house overwhelmingly, and get us more of those answers. ultimately today's hearing, we are going to be asking these questions and we expect to get some answers and we hope to continue pressing to get you more answers. with that like to yield to the ranking member of the oversight committee, mr. calmer. >> thank you member -- on the behalf of the american people to get to the origins of covid-19. it is essential to understand the origins of this virus, in order to prevent it from happening again. without a full investigation, we cannot adequately prepare

for the next outbreak. the chinese communist party spends a majority of the last year and a half misleading the world, spreading propaganda, and enabling this virus to run unchecked for far too long. the chinese communist party intentionally concealed at the severity of covid-19 to stockpile medical supplies to the detriment of the global supply chain. the chinese communists party led an initiative to conceal their true intention and deference. but they did not act alone. the world health organization helped the chinese communist party, by supporting and spreading the lies and propaganda. the world health organization deny that human to human spread of covid-19 could occur based solely on chinese communist party propaganda in early january 2020. when it became clear that human to human transmission was in fact occurring, the world health organization delayed labeling the pandemic a public health emergency of international concern because

the communist china, the chinese communist party threaten to stop all international covid-19 efforts if it made that determination. the world health organization failed to issue common sense restrictions on travel to and from china despite evidence that the travis -- virus was transmitting from people who were traveling. the w.h.o. in an attempt to cover their tracks in perpetuate the chinese communist party's propaganda issued a one-sided report on the origins of the virus in april 2021. this report had no chance of being accurate, because... the chinese communist party was given full veto power over inclusion of american scientists and they veto the inclusion of three american scientists put forward by hhs. a chinese communist party designed the missions itinerary, and refused to access the raw data, the two most important sources of information on the origins of the virus. at the behest of the chinese communist party, the world health organization altered their mission to include

farfetched origin claims like shipped frozen food. and the chinese communist party was given full power to get it and alter the final report. how could we expect anything close to full investigation and accurate report when the government seemingly responsible for the outbreak controls the entire investigation? and your, china lied. the world health organization lied. and people died. those responsible for the deaths of 600,000 americans must be held accountable. in congress must be seeking answers for seeking -- in the pandemic. after the concern is recently coming to light that the chinese communist party demanded that the nih delete the early sequences of covid-19 cases from their database. in order to best understand the origins of this pandemic, it is important to look at how the virus initially emerged in the human population. this information is mostly -- most accurately found in the first infected patients. without this data, it becomes

increasingly hard to uncover the truth. this is yet another link in a long chain of chinese communist party cover-up actions, and raises important questions about whether there were additional sequences with the chinese communist party failed to share with the world or deleted after covid-19 began to spread. despite repeated attempts by the chinese communist party to cover-up the origins of this virus, a significant amount of data has been collected and analyzed in the last year and a half. evidence we will uncover during this forum. evidence that this virus came from a lab modified version of a bat, coronavirus, is continuing to grow. as we will hear from our witnesses today, every scientific test that distinguishes between the theories of the virus and a virus jumping from an animal to human in the virus originating from a lab leak gives results at highly favor the lab origin theory. we have yet to see any hard data that supports this virus came directly from an animal to

human. i look forward to hearing more from our distinguished colleagues about their efforts to uncover the truth and look forward to hearing from our panel of experts, their work is fundamental to preventing the next pandemic, and we thank everyone for it. i yield. >> thank you member calmer, now to our former colleagues on the subcommittee from opening statements. you want to yield to...? we will go to our panel then after the first panel will come back to our members of the select subcommittee. i know that the panelists that we are going to hear from next our colleagues who have been working on the frontlines of various portions of this pandemic, but also looking into different avenues that we can get some information on regarding the origins. so, with that we will start with ranking member of the energy commerce committee mrs. rogers. >> thank you ranking members. select committee i appreciate

you being here today to answer this question and to have this forum as undoing the origins of covid-19, and the pandemic is the public health question of our time. yes, this is about accountability. this is about holding china accountable for its actions. this is also about preventing the next pandemic. and stopping the death and destruction that will come with it. to do that, we must understand how it started. as the republican leader on energy of commerce committee, i oversee public health. energy and commerce committee members are taking her -- our duty very seriously, seeking the truth. i can assure you that we believe that we will leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of the truth. china is refusing to cooperate. this comes as no surprise to anyone who is familiar with the communist regime. which one is obstruction should not deter our work as there is a significant amount of information relevant to the origins of covid-19 and the

pandemic outside of china. let's start with -- and his president dr. peter domestic. your party lines has been partnering with the wuhan institute of virology for years. in doing so, using american funds. it is no wonder that he's done everything in its power to shut down any discussion of the lab leak theory. in fact, on march 7th 2020, he organized scientists to submit a letter published in the -- they called any consideration of the lab, a conspiracy theory, which led many in the media and big tech to silence the debate. it is also and not surprising that -- who has a significant conflict of interest was the only american scientists allowed to participate the w.h.o.'s investigation into covid-19 origins. -- we should light on the origins

of the pandemic. but he refuses to cooperate. if you have nothing to hide, then why not help us? dr. daszak you received american funds and use those funds to calm ducked research on coronavirus at the institute of virology, you owe the american people to be transparent. our own government also holds a significant amount of information that will help us put the pieces of this complex puzzle together. energy and commerce with a nash i h, -- the national laboratory, the department of homeland security, the gao, and usaid. we are making strides with these things. i want to be clear, we are not can satisfied with the level of cooperation. this administration must be more transparent. for weeks, the biden administration officials have been calling on china to be more transparent. well, mister president, i would ask you to hold yourself and

your agencies to the same standard. open up and be transparent. you owe it to the american people. you ought to every american who has lost a loved one to covid. every nurse, and first responder, who were gay and i to fight covid to keep people safe. and every child who's faced the mental health emergencies and school closures and lockdowns. they deserve answers answers -- did the nih fund risk research at the national institute of urology have -- did the nih circumvent our pause in the gain a function research by funding the research through ecohealth alliances and in the wuhan institute of virology? did the nih ensure that assessments work and on did if they were on that had appropriate safety protocols to prevent a lab leak? did the nih adequately account for any national security risks that could arise from funding research through ecohealth alliance in the wuhan institute

of virology? the american people deserve answers to these questions. we will not rest until we get them. thank you. >> thank you. now, the ranking member for the permanent select committee on intelligence, mr. nunez. make sure your microphone is on. >> it shows that it's on now. i'm happy to be here to discuss the work of the intelligence committee to uncover the truth behind the origins of covid-19. for nearly a decade, house intelligence committee republicans have been investigating china's malign activities across the globe, from concerns over huawei to china's belt and road initiative to its thrift -- aggressive activities in the south china sea. we have actively work to determine the nature and scope of the nefarious chinese activities.

we have faced the china threat head on, because we believe what's at stake here is nothing less than our future as a free society. i also recognize the efforts of our colleagues in this room and i commend you for your strong leadership and the roadmap for covid-19 accountability released last week. the chinese government represent an existential threat to freedom across the globe. strong, dynamic, fearless leadership is what is needed to combat a threat of this magnitude. unfortunately, the democrats possess none of these qualities, particularly when it comes to china. president biden has failed to do anything meaningful to hold china accountable. congressional democrats have no interest in protecting our nation and people from this threat and the media continues to serve as a mouthpiece for china, the biden white house,

and democratic leadership, along with help from big tech. consequently, last month, a committee of republicans on the house intelligence committee released an internal report on covid-19 and the wuhan institute of virology laboratory. in brief, here is what we found. first, there's simply no substantive evidence supporting the theory that sars covid two was the virus transferred from an animal to human in recent scientific scholarships a guest that such zoonotic transfer is not likely. chinese researchers have failed to find the original bat population or species from which the virus may have jumped, despite testing more than 80,000 animals. second, there are multiple warnings about safety beginning

as far back as 2017. health and science experts from the embassy in beijing warned the labs work to make viruses infectious to humans, could result in the accidental unleashing of a sars like pandemic. third, the report outlines how china engaged in highly sensitive gain of function research at the wuhan lab. as we know, gain of function research can create viral strains that can unintentionally cause a pandemic. under the leadership of dr. fauci, they funnel to u.s. taxpayer dollars to the wuhan lab for again have function research. the people's liberation army and reportedly conducts secret scientific research in the wuhan lab and the head of the lab is a major general in the people's liberation army he was recognized as china's top bio

warfare expert. it's difficult to understand why the u.s. government permitted and funded collaborative research. finally, china has prevented an investigation into the origins of covid-19. why would they do such a thing if the virus originated from an animal? this is what led the administration to insist china cooperate or face isolation in the international community. this is a weekend and effective position to take. china does not respect weakness. stronger steps are needed to ensure we get to the bottom of this matter, and have confidence in the result. the biden administration only called on china to cooperate a week after the house intelligence committee released our report and after efforts to investigate the origins of covid-19 have begun to resonate with the american people. the democrats are not

interested in finding the truth. that's why they are not here today. they are only interested in cynically getting ahead of the storyline. remember my comment about the media acting like a mouthpiece for the communist party. the media labeled trump a xenophobic for suggesting it was the result of a lab leak. the possibility the virus originated in a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory by the press. facebook banned and removed posts that claimed the virus may have come from a lab. why? they fear information. the fact that the democrats and their allies in the media were more interested in hurdling insults at their political opponents, rather than fostering an open discourse about the origins of the virus that has killed more than 3 million people worldwide.

i appreciate the work of this committee to continue our investigation into china's malign activities. i yield back. >> thank you for the work and presentation. now, chairman mike mccaul. >> thank you, whip scalise, and as many of the, no i began investigating the origins of covid-19 in april last year. that was as a top republican on the affairs committee and as the chair of the china task force encompassing 11 committees of jurisdiction. speaker pelosi said this was a diversion. i released my initial report last september. we touched on the possibility that it could have come from the lab. after continuing to research this topic, i feel comfortable

concluding it's more likely than not that it came from the lab. i would say there is credible evidence, as a former federal prosecutor. we may never know for certain, because the chinese communist party went to great lengths to cover up this outbreak. they detained doctors in order to silence them. they destroyed labs. they hid the fact that there is clear evidence of human to human transmission, and they refused to allow a real investigation into the origins. at the same time, the w.h.o. failed to warn the world of the impending pandemic. instead, he pirated ccp talking points and it was really acting as a puppet of general secretary xi. this was the worst cover-up in human history. now, more than one year later,

at least 4 million people have lost their lives, including more than 600,000 americans. the biden administration is refusing to take investigating the origins of this virus seriously. they are pushing for another w.h.o. investigation, even after the last one was so tainted by the ccp that even tedros has said more investigations need to be done. that's why we are here. the president and congressional democrats are forcing us to do this work alone. as we continue this investigation, i believe it's time to completely dismiss the wet market as a source of the outbreak. we have confirmed cases ten days before the wet market cluster that had no connection to the market itself. i would say this is a diversion by the ccp and all roads point to the lab.

even as the ccp has admitted -- as a former federal prosecutor, the evidence that came from the lab is very convincing. state department cables from 2018 detail significant concerns about the safety protocols not being followed at the new campus of the wuhan institute of virology. we know this was not the first instance of safety protocols being ignored at the chinese labs. in 2004, sars leaked from a similar lab in beijing. we now know that at the same time of the state department cables, than for several years before, scientists were conducting gain of function research at both the new and old facilities. this is genetic modification of the virus to make it more viral, to make it more transmittable, to make it more infectious in

humans. some of this research was conducted, even though that kind of research should be conducted. the results are far less secure. by the way, there is one very close to the wet market. in addition, and a city five times larger than the city of houston, the first signs of the new illness were all clustered around the old facility. then, on september 12th, 2019, they took the virus database off line. you have to ask the question, why. removing the database would prevent hospitals in the city from comparing samples from sick patients to the labs a library of viruses and. if the ccp was attempting to

cover-up a leak of coronavirus, this would remove the ability to link covid-19 back. according to a harvard study, five of the six hospitals surrounding the old wiv saw the highest daily average of cars in their parking lot in two and a half years. this indicates people around the old wiv facility were suddenly sick or than usual. and they were visiting hospitals at a higher rate than usual. if an outbreak had begun around september, this is exactly what we would see. new testimony received by my committee reveals the chinese military potentially took over this lap not in january 2020 as reported, but earlier in 2019. the chinese military were in the facility in 2019. that signals to me as a prosecutor that the ccp was

worried about something in the lab before the world knew what covid-19 was. why else would they put the chinese military in charge? in october 2019, wuhan hosted the 2019 world military games. these are similar to the olympics, but with military personnel competing. more than 9300 athletes from over 100 countries came to the city and it should have been a massive public relations opportunity for the ccp. yet, no fans or observers were allowed to attend. there were reports of roads being blocked with athletes describing wuhan as a ghost town. if a virus had leaked from the lab in early september, and there was an uptick in hospital visits around the old wiv, the ccp would likely be worried. this would potentially leave them back and lock down the

city and banned fans from the game, which is exactly what happened, and most telling of all, dozens of these athletes have recently come forward saying they got sick while at the games with what would now be classified as covid like symptoms. the village where the athletes lived as less than eight miles from the old wiv and connected to downtown wuhan by a new subway stop. i now believe this was actually one of the earliest covid-19 superspreader of events. at least four of these athletes were from countries who have now confirmed the virus was circulating within their borders in november and december of 2019. notably italy, brazil, france, and sweden. that's the timeframe it entered their borders in late october, likely from the military game athletes. i've also discovered important new facts. they not only point to the wuhan institute being the

likeliest point of origin, but they establish a high likelihood that the virus was man-made as well. we have found the answer to the question additive virus for mccabe 1000 miles away get to the middle of a city of 11 million. it wasn't natural. it was a lab. next month, the house foreign affairs committee will release an updated origins report that will detail all of our new findings. with that whip scalise, thank you for having me. >> thank you. i appreciate the testimony as well as the work the committee, the china task force, is doing to get these facts out here. someone else who has been working on this for over a year now, our colleague, congressman gallagher. >> thank you. i can't think of a more important question facing the world today than how this

pandemic started, which makes it all the more tragic that we don't have the willing participation of our democratic colleagues. i don't see this as a republican question or a democrat question. this is a forensic of how this actually question. started. that being said, i strongly support the establishment of an intermittent bipartisan expert commission, and some experience in the cyber domain leading such a commission, and i've seen the power of a harvard commission of both legislators and out side experts to break through the noise and deliver serious bipartisan recommendations. but even in the absence of such a congressionally mandated condition, i think there are a number of steps that we can immediately take to better understand the origin of the virus. i don't want to rehash -- >> a like to add this to the discussion, four things stand. out first, and most obvious, is the reference. we have to declassify all

intelligence products, reporting, assessments related to covid-19's origins in a particular, those underpinning the icy assessments related to president biden's may 26th 2021 directive on -- the january 21 state disclosure from the -- the april 30th 2020 dni statement on covid origins. that statement is openly available, and worth revisiting with our entire intelligence committee concurs. that this was not man-made or general tickly modify. how did that happen? i think that we all would find that interesting to know. number two, issue subpoena to the -- four files related to the collaboration with the wuhan institute of our-ology. number three, auditing the records of all federal agencies for a thorough counting of federal funding that might gone to the institute of our apology and wuhan, through the reporting, as such as ngos,

directly or indirectly, through parties such as the equal health alliance over the past decade. ranking member michael mentioned the won military gains. for example, i wrote a letter to the secretary of defense and, the chairman of the joint chiefs asking, have we interviewed the 284 americans that want to those games? where these americans tested for antibodies? what did we learn from that process? we haven't started that process, we can still begin. it is not too late to get more information, ladies and gents. fourth and finally, continuing the state departments controlled investigation into potential biological weapons conventions, in violations by the chinese communist party. regardless of the outcome of these investigations, we should follow the data wherever they lead. there are at least three broader lessons that i believe we can already take away from this experience. in the interest of brevity, i will not go into all of the detail happening with the follow-up questions, but the first is a pervasive influence of what is called united front work. perhaps the easiest way to understand the chinese communist parties united front work is to think of it has

inception. the ccp influences or co-ops, foreign elites, oftentimes without the direct knowledge, to spread messages that align with the parties interest. and without speculating on their motivations, it is hard to escape noticing that many of the individuals who have been most critical of the lab leak hypothesis, peter gastric was mentioned, mcmorris rogers. we have to know that peter daszak is a zoologist not a virologist, anybody who signed that letter... at least, five members who signed that lancet letter are now on the lancet investigation committee origin of the disease, if you can believe it. the chair also has prevailed conflicts of interest. they have direct and long-standing relationships with chinese entities. the second is the need to enhance american biological defenses, the tragic deaths of over 600,000 americans in the losses to mark on me, have signal to our adversaries the biological warfare could be a highly effective mechanism to

attack our homeland. and given the rapid advances of synthetic biology, we need to act quickly so that our adversaries cannot weaponize biology against this. and third and finally, i believe it is long past time for us to completely decouple our scientific collaboration of the people's republic of china. like many americans, i was startled to discover the taxpaying resources made their way to the wuhan institute, which we know from the january 2021 fact sheet, engage in classified research on behalf of the chinese military. while scientific elaboration is an important part of our technological leadership, we have plenty of like-minded allies and partners that are not actively engaged in genocide north threatening their neighbors with invasion that we can work with. and unfortunately, given the direction of the ccp policy, scientific collaboration is likely only to enhance the party's grip on power through new ways to surveil or control their population, and in the worst-case, develop the ability to wipe out entire populations

depending on their whims of the body. ranking member scalise, you started off by commenting that this is worse than chernobyl. i agree with that. i've called this the ccp's chernobyl. if you see in the hbo miniseries chernobyl, there's a moment at the end when the lead scientist, -- makes a comment and he says, every ally we tell incurs a debt to the truth. and sooner or later, the debt is paid. while the debt occurred by the ccp's lies has cost us over 600,000 american lives and counting. and we owe it to these people and to their families to get to the truth. thank you, i yield back. >> congressman gallagher i thank you for that work and that presentation. before i go to the members of the select subcommittee for their opening statements. since it's been referenced twice now, i did not want to ask unanimous consent to enter the consent senate bill 13 48. this is the bill that would require a director of national intelligence to declassify

information relating to the origin of covid-19 and for other purposes this bill passed the senate unanimously and is still sitting in the house. without objection, this will be added to the record. and that will go to mr. -- for his oversight. >> thank you mister chairman. friday, january 21st at 10:32 pm, doctor fauci gets an email from christian anderson, kristen anderson is a british researcher who's received numerous grants from nih. to really important sentences are in that email. two sentences that dr. fauci's attention. the first is this, the unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome. so, one has to look really closely at all of the sequences to see that some of the features look engineered. again this is january 21st 2020. second sentence, and the, bob, michael and myself, often the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. email arrives at 10:32 to doctor fauci on january 31st

2020. two hours later, two hours later at 12:29 in the morning, doctor fauci sends an email to his top deputy, mr. pugh austin clots. this guy has worked for fauci for 15 years, part of his inner circle, he sends it subject lines important in all capital letters. he attaches a paper on again to function research written by dr. barrack, and doctor xi. of course doctor xi is the so-called fat lady, fat woman called in the china lab. this email he sends to his top deputy, it is essential that we speak to them. keep yourself on. henry this paper. you will have tasks to do today that must be done. notice the intensity. notice the focus. i mean, this is the house is on fire email here. now, two hours after that, at 2:48 in the morning. doctor fauci is busy this

morning. 12:29, that email he sent to doctor -- his top deputy, two hours later at 2:40 in the morning he sends another email, this one to robert catholic. assistant -- trump appointee, not part of the inner circle, he attaches a different article to this email. one that says that the virus came from an animal that downplays any lab leak theory. now, again notice the tone of this one, bob this just came out today. gives a balanced view, best, tony. totally different from the previous. this is one like oh, if you get a chance, read this, gives a balance view. so, the tone is different. but also that sentence gives a balance view. it is not true either. it is just not accurate, this article downplays, as i said, the lab leak theory that emphasizes evolutionary cause to the virus. what happens next? what happens next? later that same warning, later that same warning, at 11:47 am,

doctor fauci's deputy gets back to him. i want to read you this whole email. the paper you sent me, the one that he sent him that was written by the virologist from wuhan china. the people who sent me that the experiments were perform before the gain a function pause... but have since been reviewed and approved by nih. not sure what that means since ... emily, somebody also works for doctor fauci, is sure that no coronavirus work has gone through the p three framework which is of course the oversight body that is supposed to approve any grant dollars going for gain a function research. no coronavirus work is going through the tee three framework. final sentence, she will try to determine if we haven't any distance time to this work abroad. she will try to determine if our fingerprints are on any of this. all of these emails happen in 13 hours. so, 13 hours after doctor fauci gets the initial email from christian anderson saying, looks like this virus is engineered, not consistent with evolutionary theory, dr. fauci knows some important facts. first, dr. fauci knows that

there's a lethal virus on the loose that started in wuhan china. second, he knows the american taxpayers have funded dana function research in wuhan china. third, he knows that the research granted not go through the required oversight board, forth he knows that the virus quote, looks engineered and quote, not consistent with evolutionary theory. and finally, fifth, doctor fauci notes that he may have ties to this work in china. his fingerprints are in fact maybe on this. what is doctor fauci do next? after he says, oh, whatever. what does he do next? he organizes a conference call for later that same day. 24 hours -- he organizes a conference call, 12 people on the call. dr. fauci and 11 virologist from around the world. virologist got millions of american tax dollars over the past several years. now, look at this list. here's the list of people. they're only two americans on the list, tony fauci, and one

other. most of them are from around the world, as i said. i think that the first thing you noticed is who is not on the call. who is not on the list? it is doctor -- the guy that he sent the email to the three in the morning. is doctor redfield, head of the cdc, doctor gerard who's with us today, assistant secretaries hhs at the time. doctor birx, a lady who is soon to be covid response coordinator. in fact, there's no one from the government on the call except tony fauci. tony fauci and 11 other individuals who have gotten a bunch of american tax dollars over the years. what happened on the conference call? the short answer is, we don't know. we do not know what they talked about. i think with a good idea. we don't know for sure. but we do know what happened four days later. four days later, february 4th 2020, christian anderson, the guy who started it all, who said that the virus looks engineered, kristen anderson said this, four days later. the crack pot theories run around at the moment relate to

this virus being somehow engineer. that is demonstrably false, close quote. what? and for days, this guy went from, this looks engineered to that is demonstrably false. four days you went from is this consistent with evolutionary theory, now we know that is totally evolutionary? but it gets even better. it gets even better. mr. anderson, and three of the other people on this call, right in article a few weeks later that says, covid is not a laboratory construct. and while they are writing that article there's an email from march 6th where mr. anderson conifers to let dr. fauci edit the article before it is published. and here is the kicker. here's the kicker. when the article is published, doctor fauci sites it at a white house press conference when he is asked by a reporter about the origin of the virus. sites the very article that he put in motion on the conference call, and he was allowed to get it. at the white house, where he's

supposed to give the american people the truth, he references an article that he manufactured. now, maybe i'm wrong about all of this. maybe did not work out this way, i think i'm right. maybe did not work out this way. but it would have been nice, mister chairman, if doctor fauci came today to answer questions. come here, to defend himself. he did not have the courage to do it. did you know who else did not come? remember the email about the petri framework. we invited doctor hassle to come through. he's the individual who chairs that oversight board. we invited him to come today to, and he would not come. i -- i'm convinced that these guys who right from the get-go with the truth was, they misled the american people. here is the other thing. do you know that conference call, the conference call... we got the emails regarding the conference call from february 2nd. all of these guys, all these guys were emailing back and forth in a conference call. here is what we got. here is all their emails. every single thing is redacted.

every single thing is redacted about what took place in that conference call, because i'm convinced it was at that conference call where they said, we have to cover our tracks. and again, maybe i'm wrong. maybe i'm wrong. but doctor fauci convince them right there that he would not come today. i yield back. >> thank you mr. jordan, let the record reflect that doctor fauci was invited friday afternoon, he replied. with that, we will go to dr. mecks. >> thank you so much representative scalise and, also to representative comer and all of our panelists if you're coming. today it is unfortunate that the entire committee could not join us for this important discussion. because we've already heard, understanding the origins of covid-19 pandemic has both public health and national security implications. we all know that wuhan china, where the covid-19 virus originated is home to the wuhan

institute of virology. the wuhan institute of virology is china's only cellular level bio safety laboratory that researchers human infectious diseases. the lab is only a few miles away from the wet market that is said to be the origin of covid-19. as many of my colleagues have already stated, i went to the floor earlier this month to call for a full and thorough investigation into the origins of covid-19. there needs to be a serious investigation into the origins of covid-19 and we must uncover with the chinese communist party can do. why do we think this came from a lab leak versus natural evolution? one is the initial concern by scientists and the fact that the article was removed off of the internet. two is the proximity of wiv to the wet market. three, no intermediate host, and we know we rapidly discovered an intermediate host

for sars and mers. for, the chinese communist party vigorously lobbied w.h.o. to deny human to human transmission and to avoid or delay an international emergency or pandemic. five, the removal of scientific papers by chinese scientists from the internet early in 2020, and then they took their database off line last fall. we also know the speed and rapidity and a number of variants and the unique genetic code. we must hold the chinese communist party accountable for their missteps, of which this is only one, while they were stalling and not notifying the world health organization about the extent of the covid-19 outbreak, the department of homeland security found the ccp used this time to stockpile masks, gowns, and gloves. this lost time put workers at

risk and contributed to some of the 600,000 u.s. deaths from covid-19. to prevent this from happening in the future, we must consider examining how much -- further more, we need to make sure our media gatekeepers are more cautious and allow science to work before censoring information. while no scientific changes have occurred, the media has decided to allow the theory that sars originated in a lab to be shared with the american people. people may ask why does it matter with the origins of, covid are? the vaccines are working and we are getting back to normal. as a former director of the iowa -- the last. we must get to the bottom of the origins to prevent our next

public health emergency. i believe it's our responsibility to ensure that other nations live up to their responsibilities, and at international organizations in which we participate and fund that are well regulated and beneficial. international health regulations may constitute a public health emergency of international concern. according to the reports from hong kong, the ccp identified cases of covid-19 going back to november 17th, 2019, over a month before the w.h.o. was notified. if the ccp had complied with these regulations, we could have worked with our international partners to more quickly contain the virus, limit travel, isolate people before they travel, and shut down travel more rapidly. more urgency about the virus if it was a lab leak versus

natural evolutionary causes. plus, complacency of individuals. it's incumbent upon the international community to have safety protocols, the type of research that can be conducted. is it ethical to bring a virus from the wild into a laboratory? is it ethical to have gain of function research that increases its transmission in humans? also, we as scientists and doctors aspire to research, but, should they published scientific articles if the lab is not in compliance with safety standards, or if there is not full disclosure and conflicts of interest. as a scalise said, this is the

chernobyl of virus research, and it should underscore the need for increased scrutiny of gain of function research anywhere in the world. because of hubris and arrogance of human scientists that failed with the basic function of security and safety, if we are going to be serious about advancing scientifically in order to prepare for the next pandemic, then we must let science work. we must allow for a debate and dissenting views to be heard, or we may never get to the root cause of this problem and hold the chinese communist party accountable. thank you. >> thank you, doctor. >> thank you, ranking member scalise. it's great to be back on an oversight committee. thank you both for setting this up. for many months, we have asked speaker pelosi to investigate the origins of this virus that has led to over 600,000 deaths in this country and disrupted

our society for well over a year. it's a shame our democratic colleagues continue to refuse to hold this very important hearing. for most of the pandemic, anyone who raised question about the origins of the virus was dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist. yet, despite the efforts of some of the media and all of big tech, the world health organization and the chinese communist party will continue to find increasing evidence suggesting this pandemic can be traced back to the wuhan institute of virology in wuhan, china. our panel of experts can speak in further detail of the mounting scientific evidence pointing to the origins of the pandemic. we know the lab was conducting a gain of function research specifically on back coronaviruses. if this pandemic was the result of a leak, it would be one of the greatest medical cover ups in human history.

gain of function research should never be done at an unsafe lab covered up by a ruthless authoritarian government, sending off a worldwide pandemic that has left more than 3.9 million people dead around the world. from the very beginning, beijing has actively sought to deceive the world on the origin and severity of covid-19. as the virus was spreading, the ccp silenced whistleblowers and censored others who will warned about the outbreak. furthermore, the chinese government consistently under reported cases and deaths which continues to this day. what are the chances that in nation of over a billion people has suffered around 5500 deaths and 120,000 cases? through the world health organization, the chinese government spread propaganda denying evidence of human to

human transmission, claiming the spread was under control. meanwhile, according to a dhs report, while china was deceiving the world about the seriousness of the virus, it was also working to buy up ppe around the world, increasing its imports of surgical masks by 278%. how many lives could have been saved if the world was made aware when beijing was made aware? to this day, the ccp continues to obstruct efforts to get to the truth about the origins of the pandemic. a spokesman for the chinese foreign ministry shamelessly accused the united states military of bringing the virus to china. the chinese government has threatened to sanction american lawmakers who criticize the regime's handling of the pandemic. when the world health organization finally sent a team to investigate, the ccp

completely controlled the investigation, from vetoing proposed team members and restricting access, to exercising editorial control over the final report. the only american the ccp allowed was peter dynastic of echo health alliance, the same group which channel the nih funding to the wuhan institute of virology. there is much that remains to be investigated about the origins of covid-19. we have to understand the origins of this pandemic to prevent future pandemics. today's form is the open an honest examination of the evidence that the american people deserve. the evidence was ignored and suppressed when he contradicted some of the media's perverted narrative. again, we have to ask, why is the democratic party not participating? why are our colleagues on the other side of the aisle not participating in this?

why did they not want to get to the bottom of where this virus came from? where is the penguin? we haven't found him yet. there is a strong indication, and we are looking forward to questions, but where are the democrats on this? i would submit to you it's one of the most consistent things on the other side of the aisle. they continue to forgive millions incarcerated, the uyghurs in xinjiang. they don't seem to care about international property theft. they don't seem to care about their state-owned inter prizes competing with subsidies from their taxpayers coffers. democrats don't want to hold

china accountable. that might be something else we look into. but for today, i look forward to the opportunity to ask questions to get to the bottom of the origin of the virus. with that, i yield. cts, which>> i appreciate that,. green. now to bring up our expert panelists and i thank each of you for coming. you have all done extensive research and following the science and getting the facts, which is what we intend to do today and it's probably the greatest gathering of scientists who have done a real research into the origins of covid-19 that has ever been assembled here in the capital. let's start with you, doctor. we have seen you testify before many committees. he served as an admiral in the

public health service commissioned corps, and u.s. representative to the executive board of the world health organization. as a member of the white house coronavirus task force, he was known as the testing czar and did a phenomenal job that come together, bringing people together, to address that lack of testing, to ultimately get to a point where americans could be tested. we have a great deal of gratitude to you. thank you for the work you've been doing, and you may begin. >> members of the house committee and select subcommittee, thank you for allowing me to provide my perspectives on the origin of covid-19. perspective number one, although we do not yet have indisputable evidence pinpointing the exact origin of the virus that causes covid-19, i assess that the most likely origin was an accidental infection of laboratory personnel from the wuhan institute of raleigh, gee with

secondary transmission to the local population, and subsequent spread to hundreds of millions of people around the world. it is essential that congress provides leadership for a comprehensive, transparent, and unbiased investigation to determine the most likely origins of the virus, whether the nih funded, directly or indirectly, or approved of, explicitly are tacitly, potentially dangerous research within the wuhan lab, and three, what the u.s. can do to minimize the possibility of future pandemics and enable rapid global containment of any suspicious infectious outbreak. perspective number two, there is an increasing body of evidence pointing to a lab leak origin of the virus. the w.h.o. investigation published march 1st failed to detect the presence of the virus after testing more than 80,000 wildlife, livestock, and poultry samples from 31

provinces and china. moreover, the closest virus found in nature was several decades of emulation removed from the covid-19 virus. and we now know definitively that the wuhan web market was not the origin of the virus, but was a sight of secondary spread. point number two, we know the wuhan lab was conducting potentially dangerous research on bat coronaviruses and their ability to cause pandemics, including gain of function research. this was proven in a 2015 nature medicine publication in which investigators from wuhan and collaborators across the globe reported the creation of a new hybrid bat coronavirus that could bind to and infect human airway cells. number three, since that 2015 publication, there have been multiple grants to the ecohealth alliance, all

entitled in -- and from the limited publicly available information appear to be using the exact same laboratory methods that could create novel hybrid pandemic pathogens. number four, independent scientific studies have concluded the first cases of covid in china occurred sometime between mid october and mid november 2019. this is the exact timeframe, according to u.s. intelligence, that some lab workers became ill with a respiratory infection, and according to the wall street journal, three lab workers sought hospital care for an unknown respiratory illness. finally, the bottom line is i believe it's just too much of a coincidence that a worldwide pandemic, caused by a novel bat coronavirus that cannot be found in nature, started just a few miles away from a secretive laboratory doing dangerous research on bat coronaviruses.

sometimes, the most obvious explanation is indeed the correct one. the w.h.o. cannot be relied upon to do an authoritative investigation, because it is a multilateral organization with no authority to do anything in china that's not directly approved by the chinese communist party. on behalf of the trump administration in december 2020, i delivered a comprehensive roadmap of reform to the executive board of the w.h.o. that would strengthened their global emergency preparedness and response capabilities. this roadmap was better equipped the w.h.o. for future pandemics, but by their very nature as a multilateral organization, the w.h.o. can never be relied on to guarantee transparency from repressive regimes, nor assure the health and safety of the american public. finally, with regard to the w.h.o., when this pandemic

first emerged in china and began spreading around the world, the only eligible nation that did not have a member on the w.h.o. executive board was the united states. that is because after i was nominated for the executive board by president trump in november 2018, my nomination was repeatedly blocked by senator schumer and his democratic colleagues. perspective number four, the investigation of the origins of covid-19 and the regulation of ghana function research cannot be left to scientists alone. many have serious conflicts of interest. these conflicts include hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual salary, pharmaceutical companies,

millions of dollars in grants, rights to inventions that could result in tens of millions of dollars and royalties, and most important, their reputations among and often elitist scientific community that's overwhelmingly biased against anything related to the trump administration. americans should be fearful of defenses of china by experts employed by or on the boards of companies with billions of dollars at stake in china, and who fear reprisals from the chinese communist party. it's critical to our nation and to future generations that we develop a bipartisan consensus on the truth of what happened. i respectfully encourage the entire congress to come together as truth seekers and truth tellers to accomplish this objective. thank you for inviting me today and i look forward to your questions. >> thank you for that statement. we will continue to seek that

bipartisan cooperation. doctor david asher is a senior fellow at the hudson institute. most recently, he led the new york state investigation into covid's origins and whether china's conduct violated a constitution of the -- thank you for joining us. >> thank you, ranking member gohmert, all the members of the select committee examining the coronavirus. welcome. i equally would welcome the opportunity to meet with the democratic majority side as well. i'm part of the hudson institute. i approached the investigation in a non partisan way.

i've done this for democrats and republicans. this issue affects all of us, as you pointed out. in 1960, our founder wrote the book thinking of the unthinkable, talking about thermal nuclear war or methods of coping with consequences. at hudson, we are still guided by those principles, but my main concern for you today, having worked around wmd investigations and terrorist proliferation networks for nearly 30 years, we are entering an era of biological warfare, and this is the beginning of a threat level that will affect the rest of our lives and generations to come. whether the chinese did this deliberately or not in creating this pathogen, i think the chances are they were working

on it and it was funded by the military. whether they released it or not or just had an accident, i think the answer is they probably had an accident. that doesn't matter, because they allowed it to be weaponized in the wake of its release. they didn't tell us at the state department. i stand here with the assistant secretary behind me. one of the things we did in the fall of last year was really systematically look at whether the biological weapons convention had violated what the evidence was to that effect. what we found was the chinese were working on a military supported program, which they did not declare. so they lied. it involved coronaviruses, which they said they were not working on in their declarations to the biological weapons convention. mysteriously, in 2016, they stopped declaring the coronavirus research as

occurring at the wuhan institute. the kicked off the classified research with the peoples liberation army. there are a lot of things that could talk about. let me just talk about some things i recommend you consider doing immediately as members of congress. then i will talk about some things the biden administration should do. we should stop funding the chinese communist research. it's a dangerous gain of function collaboration with china that has to end. we have to enforce treaty compliance to be focused across the board. the biological weapons convention has been violated. the state department has had a

violation, a legally, and they are bound to continue the investigation under this administration. china needs to be coerced. it is a year and a half after this thing broke out and time has not stood still like a salvatore dali painting, except in beijing, where they are saying look we have been able to get away with as the economy grows 18.2%. we have tools at our disposal. we also need to prepare for the next pandemic. what should you do? an expert 9/11 like commission. i had friends who died in 9/11, but we've had a lot more friends who have died of covid-19 and the impact is more residents than anything we've seen. stop exploiting our most

precious bio capabilities overseas, especially to china. we need to amend the warfare elimination act involved in this type of malevolent work to threaten our country. finally, i'd unleash the civil litigation lawyers on behalf of the victims of this tragedy, which could have been averted, had the chinese only told us it was spreading human to human. >> thank you for your remarks. next is doctor steven quayle. he is a physician and scientist with hundreds of published scientific articles. he has been cited over 10,000 times and holds 87 patents across 22 different fields of medicine. he has invented many different fda approved medicines.

he conducted an early analysis of covid-19 which has been downloaded nearly 200,000 times. he is an expert in the field and brings an operational lot of analysis to the question we are posing about the origins now to you. >> thank you, congressman scalise, members of the subcommittee of the coronavirus crisis. i appreciate the nonpartisan approach the subcommittee is taking today. clearly, science, especially on topics related to covid, has been co-opted by geopolitics. i am here not as a mouthpiece for a particular party, but as an american scientist. i dedicate my testimony to the more than 600,000 americans the pandemic has killed so far, with the hope that by clarifying the origin of covid, we can prevent future pandemics and the loss of innocent lives. given this backdrop, i will be

keeping my remarks to matters of science. i will state facts that i have collected and explain why those facts lead to certain conclusions or rule out a hypothesis about the origin. today's testimony is never to answer the question poised december 30th, 2019, by the head of the coronavirus research at the wuhan institute of virology she had just been told a novel coronavirus and caused an outbreak of pneumonia at hospitals close to her laboratory and one. in what i believe was her last on scripted public utterance, she has been quoted as saying, could this have come from our lab. then the last 18 months, we have learned an intense amount about the origin of the pandemic, but one of my frustrations is that virologist and science writers around the world seem to want to ignore what has been learned and the inevitable conclusion it reveals. as inconvenient as it is, i

believe the evidence conclusively establishes that the covid pandemic was not a natural process, but instead, came from a laboratory in wuhan, china, and it has the fingerprints of genetic manipulation through a process called gain of function research. there are six undisputed facts that support this hypothesis. as a reminder, the top left, all zoom in no seas are diseases that involve a virus infecting animal and the animal in -- infected. the question of the origin is the question of the location of the animal. the infected human comes in contact with an animal and gets sick. for lab acquired zoonosises, the cells are in a petri dish and human works in the lab. in deciding between a natural

origin and lab origin, there are six facts no one disagrees with. number one, the chinese told the world to the covid pandemic began in the union seafood market because approximately half of the early cases had been associated with that location. this would have been reminiscent of the two previous coronavirus epidemics as both sars and mers began in the live animal markets. after 18 months of investigation, we know it did not begin in a market for the following three reasons. first, none of the 11 patients from the when end market or any other market in wuhan were infected with the earliest virus. they came into the market already infected. the four patients with the earliest genetic version of the virus often had one thing in common. none had any exposure to the market. second, in january 2020, from public scientific databases, the patient with the earliest

first complete virus sequence was a 39-year-old man treated at a general hospital located in wuhan, about three kilometers from the institute of virology. after 18 months and 3 million viruses sequence worldwide, this virus still remains the earliest. second, none of the environmental specialists had the earliest virus, meaning they also came into the market. this included 1055 samples of frozen food in the market, all of which tested negative for covid. third, 457 animals were tested, all negative for covid. 616 animals from suppliers to the market tested, all were negative. 1864 wild animals from southern china of the thai found in the chart that were tested rolls all negative. these data --

they establish that it is not we can in the market or any other market it will have. number two, failing to find it in any market and wuhan, the search was expanded to him -- after testing 80,000 samples from 209 different species from other markets, farms, nature. the market was not found any they are specimen. community acquired infection chances about one in 1 million. this is what you'd expect from a lab infection. number three -- stored lead specimens from hospitals in wuhan, from before desert 29th, there is not a single case of covid in any specimen feel -- it was expected for 100 and 400 to be positive. this in a community spread is also one in 1 million chance. this is where you'd expect for a lab infection. there's no evidence of animal

to human transmissions. with two park or no virus outbreaks, sars one, and -- 50 to 90% of early cases were from various animal to human infections. for sars-cov-2, examine genetically -- they all had human to human transmissions. for a community acquired infection this is the probability of tossing a coin 249 times, and getting heads every single time. this is however where you'd expect from a lab infection. number five, sars-cov-2 has a unique trigger on a surface called a -- unique code in the jeans for that site called a cgg dimer. these are two levels of uniqueness. it appears this is why the virus is so transmissible wine invades the hearts, rain, blood vessels and viruses like ebola

hiv, zika, yellow fever, all use these -- and is part of the reason for their deadliness. but the entire group of coronaviruses in which sars-cov-2 belongs does not contain a single example of a site like this or an example sign of the cgg dimer code. it comprehensive study by mit group shows that there is never been a site where the cgg dimer in this group of coronaviruses for at least 1000 years. and since william won the battle of hastings in -- to become monica england. let since 1992, and gain a function -- the w. i.d. and other at labs around the world have started studying these in viruses repeatedly. it's the only sure method that always makes them more infectious. and the cgg-cgg dimer code found in labs, is used in these labs including the wiv. you could order from a supply

company on the internet. by the way, some analyses have said if doctor, these analyses occur in one of the more than four classes of coronaviruses, and a process called re-combination of covid-like virus could pick one up? this is wrong for three reasons based on well-known fundamental biology at a college level. because coronaviruses do exchange genetic material so easily, the very existence and stability of these five distinct groups is evidence from nature that there must be barriers for an exchange of genetic material. i spoke previously about the 1000-year stability of a group of covid belongs to. and if recontamination was easy, this group would've merged into the other four in a single group. two things stop recompilation from happening. and this includes research by -- this happens when one poor bat is infected with two different viruses and during that cohen

faction, the genetic material gets exchanged. so, the group of viruses they have fewer sites than, do not infect the same basket overseas as the covid like viruses they do not have fewer insights. so, the covid viruses -- can only exchange during their own -- cgg-cgg dimer 4000 years. so even if you force two different viruses into a selling laboratory, they are unique genetic sequences that are equal required for genetic combination or re-combination to be occurring. the hotspots are different for each group, and incompatible bottle in a clever use of this concept, leading coronavirus untouched in north carolina once made a vaccine candidates there was resistance to keep the combination. he did not want to reconvene after he put it out. he did this by using synthetic biology to change the hotspots jeans sequences.

sars-cov-2 is pre-adopted for human transmission from the very first patient, specifically part of the virus that interacts with human cells was 99.5% optimized. when storms one first jumped into humans, it had only 70% of the changes needed to cause an epidemic. as evidence of the relevance of this work, the uk strain, remember last fall in the fall of 2020 that emerged, and was more effective, was a change in one of those 17 few spots that had not been optimized at the beginning,. some virologist may claim covid virus was not readapted appointed evidence that has been mutating a lot since it first emerged. making new variants like the delta strain, that you currently reading in the news. but the details to the story our -- covid does randomly make on average about one genetic mistake in two weeks. so after year of circulating the girl, we will naturally have an average 26 changes someone is genetic code compared to when it started. but the vast majority of these

mistakes are either neutral, having no effect on the deadliness of the virus, or detrimental making the virus weaker, less than 1% of the changes actually improve the virus. so, how do i believe that the coronavirus was talked to infecting humans into a laboratory? a commonly used game a function mesh to optimize the covid virus would've been two zero passage in a laboratory on humanized unethically modified mouse that can develop a humanlike pneumonia. you take 20 my, see infect them, you wait a week, then you recover the virus from the sickest mouse. then you take another 20, you do it again, and suddenly you're starting to kill the mice, and finally, after several weeks, due to this directed evolution, you will produce a mouse that can kill every humanized -- a virus that can kill every humanized mouse. however, it's actually challenge to create humanize moments in the first place. here, the w. ivey has acknowledged that for several years they worked with humanize

mice, developed -- the lab in north carolina, and funding the u.s. -- the state of families of those who died from covid, families those who -- families of those who have died from covid, i'm dedicated to apply my scientific expertise to understanding how this pandemic happened, and more importantly helping put safeguards in place at a research institution to be sure that this never happens again. thank you. lifornia>> riveting testimony dr quay. we appreciate the work that you've done, and now to bring you now to doctor richard mueller. he's professor physics at the university of california berkeley and has worked across this field. a study leading the two efforts that have one nobel prize, and the national science foundation ballots at tea water main ward for astounding research. the scientific expertise as been vital to the work that we're doing. doctor mueller, we appreciate you coming.

>> thank you very much mr. comer, mr. scalia see, i appreciate you doing this. it is very important having just listened to doctor quakes comments. i think that we need to recognize the power of science. and previous speakers have said that we may never know the origins, i think that that is incorrect. i think when you bring the power of science to this, we can reach conclusions that are very powerful. dr. quay has covered most of the signs that is most relevant. i'd like to emphasize five points. each of which is capable of separating and distinguishing between a natural origin, and a zoonic origin, and a lab origin. the first one is the absence of a pre-pandemic infection.

you mentioned that. and with over 9000 samples taken in wuhan, no prepaid debit infections -- that is unprecedented. they never happened with stars, it doesn't happen with other viruses. it's unprecedented. it is very difficult to explain. papers are being written trying to explain it. those papers are not evidence. they are what you do when you are stuck in the evidence, and he disagrees with you. the absence of a host animal. if you look at the famous landslide article, one of the reasons that they say that you can dismiss these conspiracy theories of a lab origin is because they explicitly say the china's indemnified the host animal. they identified it location, they even praised china for its openness. this paper, the lancet does not read well when we look at it 16 months later. i recommend a reading and see if there's any value left in it

once you regret it. the unprecedented genetic purity that doctor quay talked about against, serves, mers, they haven't had this. but it's exactly would you expect if you want to gain a function. so, each one of these things is compelling. by itself, if we had any one of the five things, and this is three of them, we should conclude that -- the evidence strongly favors the lab origin. the fact that there's no known way for that spike mutation then by gene insertion in the laboratory is a very powerful argument. and again, there are papers written the trying to explain this. but those papers are not presenting evidence. the evidence in favor of the natural zoononic evidence. there isn't any. the only evidence that it is

zoononic origin, well, there's no scientific evidence supporting those. finally, the fact that this virus was optimized... to attack humans, again, something that is never happened in natural releases. but it does happen if you run it through the gain a function. so,... there's really... all the scientific evidence argues in favor of the laboratory origin. the papers against it, and the famous paper by christian anderson in nature of medicine. his argument against -- the lab leak case was the fact that his claim -- his claim that the... spike protein had not been optimized. and it certainly would have been. that is his one argument

against it in a paper that is so widely quoted. but recent evidence that dr. quay talked about show that it was 95% optimized. i'm going to end with a little anecdote. a story that is horrifying, and more frightening than almost anything else in my life. in the early days, one was trying to teach myself zoology, i called several of my friends who are experts in zoology. one of them, i asked if he could help me produce some of this literature. this literature that suggested that there was a lab leak. and he said, no. i'm sorry rich, i cannot do that. well okay, is there somebody new law we can do? it no, nobody my lab will do it. why not? well, let me be candid. if anybody in my laboratory is discovered to be working on a laboratory leak hypothesis, china will label us enemies of china. and the laboratory will be

blacklisted. and we will no longer be able to collaborate. we collaborate all the time of china. nobody will take that risk. this is one of the most telling conversations that i've had in my life. the idea that china has managed to... interfere, break... united states freedom of expression, freedom of investigation, freedom of thought, by... through this collaboration effort, really scary. so, let me just say that some people say that we will never know, not until china confesses, or unless they have a whistleblower. well, we have a whistleblower. it was the virus itself. it came here, it came out of china, it came to us and it carried with us genetic information with -- and there are, in my mind, five compelling sets of scientific evidence that allow us to reach

this very strong conclusion that yes, it was a laboratory leak. thank you very much. >> thank you doctor muller. again riveting testimony from all of you. clearly, as we listen to the science, the data that you've presented, it raises even more questions. we're gonna go into the first round of questions. and there is a vote going on in the house floor, you'll see members getting up, going, coming back. but we are gonna continue this because i think it is very important we get as many questions, answered as possible. again, there are people who were invited who did not come today. and kind of underscores the point that if there were subpoena powers, then we could've compelled more scientists to come. why they did not want to come as a mystery. all we are trying to do is get facts. if they have nothing to hide... they should be here. because this is a question for everybody, and everyone wants to know the answer to. people across the country are not satisfied that, okay, we have a vaccine. but now, as we are starting to

get our economy open again, should we find out how this happened? shouldn't we get to the bottom of this to prevent it from happening again at the minimum? but if it was a lab leak, that raises serious questions. and so, all of you have talked about not only the hypothesis of a lab leak, when in fact the near certainty that this was a lab leak. and so, let's get into some of those facts. the biggest facts that i've seen, our number one with over 80,000 animals, tested, maybe the largest testing that has been done. a virus like this, not a single animal has been found. we talked about what gain of function research can do to ultimately expedite and make this a virus that is much more invasive to cause damage to people to be spread, at a level where it's been around a lot longer, maybe over a decade.

but doctor gerard, maybe we can start with you, when you look at all of this evidence, do we know if there are any scientist in america who were in communication with any of the scientists at the wuhan lab? who may be able to shed a little bit more light and how that any of these kinds of lee could occur? >> so, thank you for the question. i personally was not in communication with anyone there and i think it is very likely that dr. fauci was because they had recipients directly, or indirectly. that is the reason why that you need to ask him that question. i do not know that. i think it is probably likely that bob redfield, who had extensive ties, and i know was on the phone 24/7 for weeks, trying to get information from china and the w.h.o., might of had those. but i don't know that for certain. i certainly did not have communication with them. >> how could a week like this occur? we've seen with stars that there have been a number of

problems with labs, and maybe the safety, this wuhan lab, -- >> i think you pointed out that lab leaks are not uncommon. the last, i believe six deaths from storms were all from a lab leak. there was a lab leak from smallpox, and it's widely assessed that 1970 pandemic of influenza was probably due to a lab leak. so, lab leaks occurred even have the best circumstances. because these viruses are adapted to the highly infectious so that only a few viral particles could cause an infection. particularly, with this virus, with so many ends asymptomatic spreads, a person could've spread it to dozens or hundreds or thousands of people before any symptom actually arose. and we do have troubling reports that were from the state department and other agencies of potential work being done at a much lower level by the safety then should have been done at this level. so, lab leaks are not uncommon, at all. these are incredibly dangerous

microbes that are highly infectious and evolved to be that way. so, the fact that there would be a lab leak particularly where there has been issues of bio safety does not surprise me, and would not surprise any honest scientist in this country. >> doctor asher, you had given a few specific recommendations, one of those was, stop funding the ccp. research into biological weapons, biological -- biologics in general. because of this unfortunate, obfuscation, as we've seen the chinese communist party covering up information, maybe destroying evidence. gripping the world health organization. how long has this been a concern? and clearly this is something that we need to address sooner rather than later. but if you could talk more about. that >> i've been worried about this ever since the pacific affairs push, in the bush administration, and they went on the run.

those programs against north korea... the network, working financially -- china, it's been 34 years of my life that i've been shocked at the sort of lack of cognizance in the scientific community. and i'm deeply embarrassed, as venture capitalists, working mostly biotech... we're just not really thinking about the dueling nature of synthetic biology. which is ironic since in 2018, the national academy of sciences put out a very strong study warning about biotech. dual use capabilities, fueling a biological warfare related capabilities, and adversarial nations. and including in our own nation, one can get out of our labs. so, we're at a stage here, where scientists can talk about -- we can do things with biology, and can create essentially a

weapon is again a function and when it gets out of a lab, -- like in china, it can become a weapon. so, this is to me a huge issue for you sir, and all of the members here. >> and i'll ask this to each of you as my final question, because there has been a lot to debate about being function research. clearly, it has been conducted overtime. just how directly or indirectly the taxpayer funding was involved in wuhan labs, you know function research is something that we should be investigating more. but in general, weighing the pros and cons, especially in relation to these kinds of viruses, do any of you want to discuss or talk about what we should be looking at in terms of policy regarding gain a function research? dr. quay i'll start with you. >> yeah. i think -- because i'd like to get something done... you know, the good is better than the impossible that you can't get done. i would strongly recommend that

data function research be placed under the infrastructure of the institutional review board so that any federal funding of ghana function research has to -- the pros of cons of that research has to be presented to an independent laypeople where the laboratory is, and they get to decide if this sum is too dangerous. i think that one of those things that the gain of function research at the institute of virology was set up to be reviewed inside the nih, and it was never sent to them to look at. so we have proven that the current structure fails but as someone who's invented seven drugs, and worked with ir bees, 13 different clinical trials, they are very good at balancing risk to the humans, and safety. i cannot do one study in clinical trials without an er be, and we are 200 million people infected with no oversight. >> doctor giroir. >> i certainly support local review, but the national level federal view has to be overhauled. number one, how do we know that

data function research or somebody that could be interpreted that way, it gets into the nih process, and we saw from emails that there were no coronaviruses worked that got into the process. there's an intake issue. number two, there's a transparency issue. who is revealing it? what other conflicts of interest? one of their criteria that they have? that they allow are disallow... and again, i do agree that this cannot just be scientists who work in infectious diseases. they are not experts at national security. they are not experts in the ethical consideration. it has to be transparent and has to be multi disciplinary. somebody needs to be held accountable. that means either the head of that institute or the head of the nih needs to sign on the dotted line, and it must be transparent congress. and i would say that in addition to the local review, which would be a second level. >> doctor -- >> yes, i'm not that concerned about dana function research in the united states, as i think that some legislation can take

care of that. the issue is what we do about china, what do we do about terrorism groups? what we need here is a strengthening of the biological warfare convention something that demands that we have access to these laboratories and see what is going on. we could cut out all gain a function research in the united states who would you know good if the warning, institute of virology just closes his, stores does not see what it is doing it just continues on so we need to have sanctions that will demand that china and other countries be opened and accessible and the data be transparent. >> very important recommendations. thank you, now mr. -- >> thank you ranking member. doctor, after a story came out last week that the nih confirmed. the chinese scientist asked him to eliminate gene sequences of early covid 19 cases just three months after sending them.

doctor sure is a true that the best way to understand viruses to analyze the gene sequence as close to patients irresponsible? >> well, rather than i answer that, let me turn it over to dr. quay who can probably answer another aspect of that. >> yes. the elimination of that particular database was irresponsible, yeah. they gave no basis for doing so. it is very disappointing. when we come from that database was that it actually -- the patient that identified as not the genetically earliest, but near about six weeks earlier or before the henan market, that there could be some additional information if additional files were found. >> so, initially it was claimed without any evidence that there was no possible way that the virus came from the lab. >> we have been through that many times thus far. in fact, anyone who asserted this so-called lab leak theory was labeled a conspiracy theorist, or even by nancy

pelosi, a racist. so, dr. quay both for testimony and for dr. muller testimony, you analyze both -- that it came from a lab rather than zoononic origins. now dr. quay can you give us more information about sequencing from prior coronavirus epidemics like sars, and mers? >> i can. and a personal comment on the race... my wife is chinese, and my children are have chinese. so, with respect to sars one and mers and sars-cov-2. i think one of the things that you need to -- yell was one of able to quantify gain a function. i think that the best way to quantify it is that sars is natural in about half of people -- 's -- sars-cov-2 is not natural, in what 2 million? counting and probably asymptomatic over a billion. that is kind of a relative power that you should think about with what we're doing with this. and so, sequence data is absolutely critical.

i mean, there is additional fingerprints with sars-cov-2, for example, there's four signals that i'm looking at which, one of them is an area where, it looks like it is designed to kill cells more easily. one area looks like it is designed to plug up the hole in the nucleus to prevent -- from coming out. why is that important? because then you're asymptomatic. you do not get sweat and get fever from the virus, you get from the -- one side looks like the spike protein was actually humanized so that the immune system will not recognize it, to make it even harder to make the vaccine against it. and of course, we have the -- which makes it highly ineffective. so, we are missing much... sequencing data... that the chinese could have been doing. i'm sorry, one last comment. is that the -- there are certain issues that provide a great deal of sequencing of data that is very valuable, known as machines that give you just the sequence, and nothing else.

china instructed all of their laboratories around april to only use the machines that give them just the sequence, and no metadata. and that is really frustrating, because the metadata is, as all be showing next week, contains nipple virus, encephalitis virus from japan, and many other things. >> just a couple more things, i wanna make sure that i'm correct on this. we do not have any evidence that covid-19 infected and humans, and mutated prior to developing the ability to transplant from human to human, right? >> that is correct. >> what does the fact that the virus was optimized for human to human transmission tell us about the origins of the virus? >> well, again, a natural zoonosis has to process. is it jumps into humans, and you cannot do very well. it makes one person sick, or maybe they don't even know that they're sick. they have antibodies against it. but then it is built up its repertoire, and it is learning how to infect humans. and then finally, it takes -- this takes a year to 18 months. so, here, it was human to human

from the get-go. it just -- >> very good. >> that is something that indicates gain of function research. that is what it implies. the fact that it was human from the get-go implies gain of function research. there is no way that we know that that could happen in -- >> which made it could only be in the lab, not from -- >> that's. right >> dr. anderson predicted that there would be a lot of pre-a democratic blood samples because it was so adapted to humans. so, when you got zero out of 10,000 -- >> just a summarize with respect to the animals, which is... that's kind of initially ... said the virus came from. doctor muller how many animals are exam? >> at 80,000. >> 80,000 animals were examined. >> but there were certain types of animals that were never examined. dehumanized mice, and at the wuhan institute of virology. >> very good point. >> of those 80, 000, how many were found to be carrying the disease? >> zero.

>> zero. >> this is unprecedented because for sars, in which a much weaker effort was made, they found the animal within three months. and in mers where it was very will hidden in camels, and also a very low effort made, they found it in nine months. this was a tremendous effort to examine 80,000 animals from farm animals to wild animals. everything that you can imagine. except i guess, as i pointed out, the animals in the lab. [laughs] and having zero, if this... i can't imagine that the signers of the -- of the lance in article, whatever in the same letter if they had known. this >> thank you. i yield back. >> thank you, now let's go to mr. jordan. >> thank you mister chairman, doctor gerard, i want to dissect this to know where it came from doctor -- and back to dr. fauci.

now just to refresh he is doctor fauci's top deputy. so, this is the email on saturday, that was there at 11:47 in the morning. that said that in response to dr. fauci sent in the middle of night, saying hey, we got a report things, up to talk, you keep going on. we're gonna ask all this, etc. so he gets back to him, email says, the baby sent me sent that the experiments were performed, to begin the paper that is about getting function research at the wuhan. lab before the pause but have since been reviewed and approved. i'm not sure what that means. no coronavirus work has gone through. doctor, are you part the framework? >> i was not. >> my understanding is it is an oversight board that is attempting to decide if we will fund gain of function research. is that right? >> that is the intent.

and how research gets taken in, it is unbelievable to me that coronavirus would -- not even get into the process. if you look at the abstract from the latest grant, it talks about using protein sequence data, infectious technology, all gain of function. how could this not get into the process? how does it work? >> let's back up for a second. there was a pause in any gain of function research. my understanding is the pause was in 2014. i think there is a fundamental question of if we should be funding. it but we paused funding in 2014. it was under the premise that we will set up an oversight

body, oversight function, that people will have to look at this closely. who determines now, in the ap 3 framework, when it was restarted, who determines what goes in front of the p-3 framework or board? >> i am sorry. i don't know that. i don't think anyone knows that out of the hundreds or thousands of grants. who picks which ones? you have an intake problem. that means dozens, hundreds -- >> someone has to be responsible. who heads and i h? >> ultimately, the buck stops with doctor collins who is the nih director -- >> and dr. fauci? >> they are the directors. ultimately, they are the

responsible individuals. >> in the end, the people responsible for this, who are supposed to decide if a grand proposal will go in front of the p-3 framework process or not as ultimately doctor collins and doctor fauci, is that right? the buck stops there? that's correct? >> yes. it was taken away in may of 2017, and as far as i know, there has never been a grant that's gone before this structure, despite the fact that it was set up to look for a gain of function research, and my understanding is no grant -- >> my understanding is the guy who is the chair of this p-3 framework board is doctor hassle. he said in a public forum that he is the chair and he said it's been very limited, the work that they have done. but i think the big takeaway

for us today is the people responsible for making these decisions and the guy who chairs forward won't come. i think there is something there. doctor giroir, why don't you think they are here? why wouldn't they come? dr. fauci and doctor collins and mr. hassle? >> i don't know. i know tony and i know francis pretty well. i can't imagine a reason, because this is a worldwide pandemic in which millions of people have died. it may have been a result of a lab leak. highly likely, it was. there will be other pandemics in the future. and if there is something we need, not just congress, but the american people in the

world need, it's truth and transparency and. and when public officials who are supposed to have our trust don't show up to members of congress, i think that's a problem. >> they showed up everywhere for a year and a half. you couldn't go a day. you couldn't go a day and nazi dr. fauci somewhere. he was everywhere. he was the man of the millennium or whatever time declared him. he was everywhere. and now? when we have emails that he is sending out at 12 and two in the morning, and we have this gain of function that didn't go through the process it's supposed to go through, and we have all this evidence, suddenly, you can't find him. >> all those redacted emails are redacted to you and to me, but not to the people on it. he can read it unredacted and refresh his memory and inform congress.

>> he sure could. >> when i was in the trump administration, i got pained by many antagonistic members on the house or senate side. 100 percent of the time, i answered questions. i came to everything because i thought it was my duty as a public servant to be open to everyone and you know that. >> this is not the first time you've testified. >> i want my colleagues to be open and transparent with the american people. >> i want to do one more question and then i do want to come to you, doctor muller. doctor giroir, admiral, in your testimony and perspective before, you said investigation of the origins of covid-19 in the regulation of ghana function research cannot be left to scientists alone, many of whom have serious conflicts of interest. i think that is obvious. in the four emails i showed that took place in a 13 hour

time span, but i want to give you a chance to expand on that if you could. >> i have respect for scientists and physicians and people who have developed so many things that are saving lives and curing disease. scientists are people like everybody else. we have conflicts of interest and we should be open about that. we have a quotes that we cannot hide behind our white coats of self righteousness. we have hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and billions of dollars at stake, and reputations are very important among the anti republican scientific community. >> if i could do a follow-up to that. does it concern you that the conference call i represented in my opening statement, there is only one person from our government on there, and all

these others were scientists who were getting taxpayer money? does that concern you? >> it is not a smoking gun concern to me. a concern would be that wasn't related to the secretary of hhs. >> or to you? >> or to me. that should have been done. this was important. we say that it doesn't matter if it was in the lab or not, but that's not necessarily true. if we would have known to wear a lab derived bug, for which they probably had years of work, it might have appreciably helped our countermeasure. this was critical, and i think all those blacked out spots, maybe we don't need to know, but congress needs to know. >> sure do. thank you. doctor muller, in the close of

your opening statement, you said you talked to people in your community who were afraid to be doing any research that might expose the truths that this came from a lab, because they were concerned about getting blackballed by china. is that right? >> i'm not sure they were convinced. they didn't want to be involved in that kind of investigation. how that will turn out, they weren't sure. when people learned i was going to come here, i live in berkeley. i get lots of advice. i get advice not only from friends and colleagues, but from all around the country. not one person of all my friends and advisers thought i should come to this committee. >> oh? >> the reason is it was republicans.

my response is scientists are often biased. you need to distinguish between scientists opinions and signs. science is nonpartisan. science is unbiased. i came here and i told all them, i was going to come here, and i will talk to anybody. i want to present science, because i think in this case, designed by itself carries the argument. i don't want you to ask for my opinions on things. if i stick to the science, and i can defend myself. >> the chairman, he said the word you used were enemies of china. but it wasn't just china. this is my point. it was everyone. dr. fauci was against doing that. the media was against it. these people were actually

focusing on the truth. that is a scary thing for our country, and it goes right to your point. that's about opinions and politics, not science. that is what happened for the last year and a half. my point that i made in my opening statement was doctor fauci, based on what i showed you all, knew that from the get-go and was misleading the american people. maybe i'm wrong, but he could have came here and answered my questions. >> in september, when i called a virologist at a national laboratory, i was soliciting some help on this issue. he said i'm not going to touch that. i'm not going to recommend anyone touch that, because it would help the reelection of donald trump. it was a political issue for some of them. >> thank you, doctor mueller for coming to testify. we appreciate you being here

and we are here to get facts. doctor green? >> thank you, mister chair. the doctor talked about this being at least related to a biological weapons program. i would like to place it in our record the chinese submission to the 2011 biological weapons convention. it is a pretty incredible document. i had that into the record, without objection. first, documents states synthetic biotechnology poses a huge threat to mankind as it can be used in the future to create pathogens of even

greater toxicity, and infectiousness. second, the document states the sequencing of pathogen dna can also be used to synthesize new pathogens, causing traditional means of dealing with infectious disease to fail, and rendering the prevention and control of such disease even harder. the study of systems biology in the body can create the potential for biological weapons based on genetic differences between races. that's from the chinese document. fourth, the document states drugs can be administered through heiress allied inhalation, which can benefit recipient noncompliance, effectively spreading pathogens and sees causing genes. fifth, the document states foreign jeans or viruses can be

introduced and to the target population asymptomatic, lee enabling a biological weapon attack to be mounted covertly. almost every troubling aspect of covid-19 is discussed in this very document. doctor, do you believe china has a biological weapons program? if so, what is the percentage of the chance that this virus was designed as a biological weapon? >> china does have a biological weapons program. it does involve synthetic biology, gain of function technologies, which is why it was particularly distressing to learn that we were providing material aid through financial assistance, scientific dollars, as well as just complicity to the chinese communist effort that was centered around the peoples liberation army. this is not really a secret.

i will mention in passing, the people who built the lab, the most dangerous lab in asia, one of the most dangerous labs in the world for enabling this recharge, with the french. the french were kicked out. they were feeling the pressure from the chinese in 2015, just as they started to build this lab. the french government in 2017 was fully evicted, humiliated actually. the prime minister had gone there for -- i don't think that jinping was there, but his vice minister was. and weeks later, they were sent away. they came out and warn people, i was astonished because i was in the biotech sector at the time. i heard all about this i mean, we were like, we better not be working with china anymore because the chinese are embarked on something that looks like wmd's. why did the state department on notice? whatever the came down to was our nonproliferation bureaucracy we separate from the arms control bureaucracy, and for whatever reason, they just did not see the importance of synthetic biology in advance

game and function application as a warfare threat. well, now we know it is a warfare threat. was this a weapon? probably not. it was a weapons related development. a weapon -- the reason i don't think it was a weapon being employed, at least. as i found the chinese were confused when this originally happened. they were asking us what is going on in wuhan? and then i thought to myself, they really understood this, why would they have dealt with what you know, professor muller would say. they would've released in 40 trick outside of maryland. then they could've blame the united states. i think this was a laboratory disaster, a biological meltdown, but then they covered it up. and when they covered it up and didn't tell you know giroir, and others, it proliferated as a weapon would. any virus that gets out can effectively become a weapon. which leads me to a final thing. the chinese, again, have told us in 2011 that this was going to happen. they told us that they were gonna pursue and in effect,

these types of capabilities. because they say that's the future of warfare. well, today, we at state and other government agencies, we know this. but we have no export controls on gain a function technologies from the united states, even in communist china. and i am not offering regulation of my own business area biotechnology, which, you know, it can save the world, but can also in the world. when we have basic export controls like we have for biotechnology? especially since we are at the epicenter of the bio tech revolution in the world today and the chinese are desperate to get a hold of our technology? thank. you >> i think that that is an excellent point. do you think that this was an intelligence failure? or you think this was a decision maker that had the information and ignored it? >> it was an intelligence failure if we can use the intelligence between our ears, we understand that the french government -- they'd been kicked out. our ally -- they would've worked very closely with the national institute of health. i don't understand how the

national institute of health didn't know that the french had been evicted from the number one chinese cooperatives program the world. that was -- but you know, there were things that i will mention in passing. some of the information that could be basically -- declassified the secretary pompeo presented on january 15th, right here, it was dated november, december 2019. it was all the classified, as information, we won't say what was classified, what was unclassified. there was a mix. but most of it was very sensitive information. how did it take a year -- maybe go to your desk at the same time that it got us. before or after 9/11 i was shocked because we have learned expo facto the 2019 site that we knew somehow that our system that this might happen. part of this is just policy makers themselves. i didn't want to emphasize the threat of biotechnology.

so, i don't blame our intelligence community, or hold them to the fire on duly. we did not tell them that this could happen, and we could have this at the top of the wmd priorities, not toward the bottom. because dr. muller one of the greatest experts on nuclear war will tell you, it's probably a lot more probable then via war. it's a lot cheaper. and dr. quay has even done estimates on what a nuclear, versus by a war would cost. it is pretty cheap, pretty effective. i'm more worried now, not just about china but about every terrorist crack pot that i've dealt with in the world of the last 30 years coming out of the shadows to try to get a hold of u.s. technology to program these things anbar reactors. >> if i may, i spent much of my career in biological warfare defense, with darpa, and a de-trick. threat advisory committee, and i just want to emphasize that i agree with everything that dr. atlas said. export controls. but i do want to raise another very little secret that really needs to be looked at by

congress, and that those export controls should also include americans dna sequences. this is a really vital piece in general, even the nih often exports gene sequencing for many of our people to china. china absolutely keeps databases on what's in our jeans, what are our susceptibility. is there a possibility of have take weapons. however china does not allow sequences out of their country. there's a reason for that. so, i don't want to steal your thunder, dr. asher, but it's not just technology, but it is information and genetic information is really critical. >> the last thing -- dr. greene, sorry to interrupt. but the one area that you did not mention which is the scariest, not that you did not read it. i mean, it's just so terrifying that i can process it. and the chinese declaration in 2011 -- they talked about systems biology further revealing

genetic markers, that can yield an improvement level of human health, but also can create a potential for biological based on genetic differences between races, once hostile elements grasped the difference between -- different ethnic groups, particular pathogens. they could put their technology to practice inquiry genetic weapons targeted a racial group with a particular susceptibility. i'm certainly not a racist. but -- and i've spent my life in asia. but you through the biological weapons convention, that's pretty scary. >> thank, you shifting gears a little bit, doctor giroir. you mention in summer testimony earlier, we've all talked about this, conflicts of interesting. could you elaborate on the type of conflict of interest --

i don't use the word cover-up by our media, but the lancet article -- >> so, let me first say that i'm not accusing anyone of anything. but i want to be really explicit as a physician, as a scientist, as a person who had nih grants, and a professor of medical school. i did this routine. people are salaried hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. that is a potential conflict of interest. they want to jobs, they want their money. millions of dollars in grants. the currency of the realm are nih grants. they had three years of nih funding, continuously. this is not only financially rooted but it's also prestige factor. people who have inventions could make tens of millions of dollars based on those inventions when they saw those -- those industries. but again, i do believe, and i saw it on a daily basis, and some of these esteemed colleagues said, you know,

there was -- president trump was a controversial figure. okay. we were controversial when the trump administration was there. but there was such bias against the president that even thinking that you are hoping the president -- or helping the president, you are ex communicated from the scientific community. and i think that that is a really important factor. -- >> so i want to just dig in on that a little bit. so, i'm a physician and we did in residency you know this thing called journal club. it was designed to teach us how to seek a bias and medical studies. we would look at, we'll, where the research was funded by the drug they're investigating? so breaking it down to the simplest level. was there selection bias in the population that was examined in the study? all of these different types of biases in science, right? would i just heard from you is that there is a new bias in our scientific community, and it is trump. and if you are going to

research anything that could, you know, prove the president statement true, then... that absolutely is rejected out of hand. and therefore a form of bias? is that what i'm hearing? >> you are hearing that, and i'm going to tell you, and i'm not going to go into specifics, but physicians who were on the task force, or who were around the task force were under tremendous pressure from their scientific colleagues did not even show up with the president onstage, advising the oval office. tremendous pressure, and they felt it. this was real. and again, i -- i'm not going to read into that too deep, but dr. birx said that she knew that her career was over the moment you came to the task force, because she would be prejudicially -- >> ex communicated from the scientific community, that she may have supported some thesis that scientifically was true, and we all know to be true but trump supported. >> it's not even the thesis, it

was just on the same place with the president. >> you can't even be in the same room. >> and, that is true. >> and people died because of the false information that has been put out, right? we know for a fact, columbia university! not a bastion of conservatism. columbia university said, 60% of the people who died could have been saved had china just said, human to human transmission three weeks sooner. and this group of people the media, and the dorsey's, and the zuckerberg of the world who refused, called it a conspiracy theory! oh, it's a conspiracy theory... people died. that blood is on the hands of the social media giants, and the media, and the people who refused -- and just completely supported whatever china and the world health organization said. we have scientists, competent scientists saying differently

and being ostracized. shame on you. of th e foreign mister chairman, i'm probably wherever my time... [laughs] >> thank you, very good question. >> thank you. as a member of the foreign affairs committee as well, i was just really curious about talking about the responsibility of local global leaders to determine the origins and work together in cooperation to prevent a future pandemic. i'd love to ask david asher, some of his thoughts on working at the secretary of state partners on the global level, and those that you work with, working we build upon that to ensure that to hold accountability but i know that there's been a hesitancy from our global partners and whole and holding china accountable, and really demanding answers to

the origin story. so i'm really curious about your origin work that you made. >> thank you very much for that important question. yeah, the lack of cooperation among even our five eye partners in the intelligence world was a bit surprising. the information can be had, talk to the french. i think it's tremendous amount. we're still in touch. they've had one of the best intelligence services on the face of the earth, did you gse. they've come, out there very secretive, and makes the cia spokesperson look a little bit loquacious. but if the mountain said that they were very conserve started in 2015 that this was gonna have a wmd relationship with france, directly, inherently, and not intentionally at all, but because of the scientific cooperation and lose sincere i have no doubt that the institute of france sincerely

want to help combat reemergence of sars. and the french establishment, wanted to be helpful. but i know that the french foreign minister like the state bureaucracy -- we should have been not second -- we should've been second guessing ourselves in having a more important policy that eliminated proliferation. i found an awful lot of the nonproliferation bureaucracy, permanent bureaucracy, it was cleared on things that in hindsight were proliferating. giving -- wuhan institute technology, knowing that four years there had been suspicions of its involvement with the chinese people liberation army, which now the washington post has put out last week, is in their actual construction manual for employees. i believe that it talks about this specific program, the need to manage loyalty to the party above anything else. it's on their website. so, the risk management thing here -- the cooperation now. we knew the coalition of the

willing among other things -- as a professional, and nonpartisan person, to end the coalition against these law mick state, which you know at first was entirely politically-charged. no one wanted to do it. we weren't gonna go and blast them, i say we have to attack their economic underbelly. general ellen, general macfarlane health plans together. guess what, we took them out. it brought together all sort of states. things that we never thought would cooperate. we brought our partners at nato, partners in the first arab coalition. there are people that will work with us. the singaporeans... they have neither interest in wuhan. the french. our own scientists have -- i'm confident we can get to the bottom of this issue. i concur with my colleagues that, the idea that will never know -- we're gonna know. we can earn an awful lot, learn an awful lot. we have rewards at the state department for justice programs. like, i give ten or 15 million

dollars with al-qaeda after 9/11 to anyone from the wuhan institute that wants to defect, that actually has seen the level knowledge. i've done some things in the intelligence community. you know how to handle it. we will get to the bottom of this. the problem is when we do, we will be scared out of our minds. and that's what i fear. fear itself could be the problem. >> is that why you believed that the president and nancy pelosi, doctor fauci, that they just refused to truly investigate this, to allow the select subcommittee to hold hearings? >> i used to sometimes sit on amtrak with the president. he was always find me. he has done the right thing and enabling the intelligence community to try to actually work with the laboratories to get to the bottom of this.

we are actually seeing some of the democrats asking questions and asking for our expertise. as much as this is a politically-charged environment on the senate side, i have hope as a person who is an independent american citizen. we have to be organized. that's why the idea that representative gallagher put forward about this commission, 9/11 was terrible. it's the 20th anniversary. we spent so many years in the war on terror fighting it. this war and, we need to do something to stop war in the future. this could kill every one of us. there are much worst types of diseases that could be

manufactured, something called a triad that causes alzheimer's and body dementia. we have seen al-qaeda research this. there are so many things that can get worse. we just have to get organized. i hope there will be a new harmony between both parties. >> one more question. >> i haven't talked about the thing that keeps me up at night the most. we've talked about china and what its capabilities are, and they are very expensive and complicated, but there was a paper in february 2020. using kitchen equipment, they were able to order the pieces of sars covid two from a service supply company, a

different places. and in bakers yeast, and they were able to put these eight pieces together inside the sourdough yeast and get it to express sars covid two. then you look at how many times that's been downloaded. that paper has been downloaded 118,000 times. i would like someone to look to see if any terrorist watch lists are on that download list. >> i appreciate you sharing that. that's certainly scary. one last question, because i want to focus more on the world health organization, one reentry into the world health organization without using the leverage to be able to try to get their cooperation in a more formal investigation. i feel that some of the most outrageous actions taken by the who and the ccp was that they

were given full veto power over american scientists. they vetoed the three american scientists put forth by hhs. the only american accepted was the ceo of ecohealth, which was interesting, since they've historically funded the wuhan institute. the ccp designed the itinerary and at the behest of the ccp, they altered the mission to include farfetched origin claims like shipped frozen food. the ccp was given full power to edit the final report. what should we be doing as a nation with regard to holding who accountable, being that we are the largest funder of who, and we deserve to be treated with respect, not played for fools. and what should we be doing with our partners? >> we are not really sure how much of this came out, and i do want to get it on the record.

and our ambassador had a personal meeting with director general tetris as well as ryan. they told the ambassador that we should submit names for the w.h.o. investigation. that got relayed back to me through the office of global affairs. we picked three scientists. we didn't do a political biopsy on that. we had no idea what they were from. i recommended them to the w.h.o. through all the official channels, and crickets, not one word back about the recommendations. and i wanted to get that on the record. they went out of their way to pick people who cannot be bothered to be political or have a bone to pick in any way just to try to get the truth.

point number two, whether we would have withdrawn from the w.h.o. or not eventually, i don't know, but you don't give up all your chips while you are trying to get the w.h.o. to change. i am happy to put on the record the roadmap for change that came from the w.h.o. executive board delivered by ambassador -- department of state. it will never be perfect institution because it's an -- but there are things that strengthen it outlined by the trump administration. and it was the same as france and germany. they didn't want to sign on with the u.s. at the time, even though they had the exact same language. that's a good place to start. >> it sounds like the doctor should be coming before the subcommittee in the near

future. thank you. >> now let's go to dr. meeks. >> let me thank ranking member scalise and congress for putting this select subcommittee together. your testimony is critically important and it's a shame that our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are not here. this is not a partisan issue. this is not an american issue. this is a world issue. it's of critical importance and you are in courage, i am extremely grateful for. as both a physician and director of public health, i can tell you, doctor giroir, the things you are talking about as conflicts of interest, even as educated as we are, we are still susceptible to peer pressure. we are susceptible to the desire to be published, lauded

by our peers, to present at conferences, and all these things are the type of pressure and conflict of interest, even at universities were i've been on faculty. we can no longer accept a pin from a drug company because it would be a conflict of interest and prescribing a medication. i've never prescribed medication because i've got a pin. what you are talking about is extraordinarily sobering. it's not just that 600,000 americans have died of covid-19. i asked doctor valencia of the cdc in april when she testified before our committee how many excess deaths were there in 2020. 500,000 excess deaths. those are from cardiovascular events, cancer that was not detected, people who did not go into the emergency room, cancer that was not treated diabetes

that was not treated, drug overdoses, suicide. an article last year said in san francisco alone there were more deaths from drug overdose, far exceeding deaths from covid. the number of deaths from youth suicide, which is a tragedy in this nation, because of our response to covid-19 and the pandemic, we will never recover. even the world health organization has talked about childhood poverty, much greater than 50% higher. it will be decades until we recover the ground that has been lost. when we talk about the pressure among scientists to convey information simply because they didn't like who may have espoused the information, those are issues we have to address as a nation. i know you all had information you wanted to convey, so i may

leave my time. but i do want to ask two questions. doctor giroir, if we had known about the magnitude of the virus sooner, do you think our response would have been different. >> yes, i do. the cdc has had its ups and downs during the response, but the one thing the cdc does better than anyone in the world is get on the ground, investigate transmission, and let us know about the virus. if we could have known about asymptomatic transmission two months before and it could have potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives, i do believe, and i wake up at three in the morning still thinking about these questions. when you get to the ultimate source of death as cnn would say in the autopsy, it was a lack of chinese transparency early on.

i think we could have at interventions much more timely because we would have known about the virus. that's my opinion. that's not science. that's my opinion, we would have done something differently in the cdc. >> i would say the same thing about treatment modalities that we were not able to discuss as physicians because we were censored or suppressed. this is for any one of you. are you aware and how many variants are there of sars or mers? >> are you speaking of sars one? and mers? the variants are defined by numbers of infection. and with sars 1, it's very limited. i think with mers, there are two. >> the fact that we have so many variants already of sars-cov-2, and so rapidly, does that shift us away from a

natural caused evolutionary disease? does it shift it more towards work in a laboratory or a manipulation? >> i don't believe that event does, because what you have is under 10,000 human infections with sars 1 and mers, which will generate a number of variants, and then you have 200 million over here. i want to comment on something that needs to be amplified. it's important to know about human to human spread early. but i have to tell you, the concept of asymptomatic spread, which was very unknown, and which maybe parts of modifications that occurred, and to me, that's the cornerstone of having saved so many lives. >> could there have been genetic manipulation to make it

more transmissible? >> the published paper in 2018 -- hi interferon, low interferon, no interferon, and that was done on the backbone. they did that work. they did suppression of the antigen's on the spike protein to show who they could kill and who they couldn't in other viruses. all these pieces are in sars-cov-2 as well. >> given the information you have revealed today in about exporting our biotechnology, are you concerned about the president being willing to give up the intellectual property protections for the vaccines? >> okay, conflict of interest. 87 patents and seven drugs have been invented. i like patents.

but beyond that, and i think because they are around so much money, and there is another way to do it without breaking something that's in the constitution we started with. i teach a course where patents are the foundation of america's success, because one family like mine in the 1800s got to make food creates for two generations and then they gave it away. everything was patented at one point in time. it's an incredible engine of collars. >> do you want to add something, dr.? >> [inaudible] >> it's important to protect it so you can continue to develop that. >> number one, i think patents are critical for innovation, but number two, it's completely naive of this administration to say we will just give a patent away for sophisticated

manufacturing of vaccines that takes years and billions of dollars of expertise. we are going to give it away so someone else can manufacture it. it is just naive. it does not make biological sense. it is a fantasy world, what needs to happen if you want to do that is exactly what we did on the administration. have an option to buy two billion vaccines, have them manufactured by the companies that have planted in them, and then give them to the world. you don't give this technology to other countries. number one, it violates our patent innovation, but never too, they cannot do it. because you know, you're going to have contaminated vaccines, bad vaccines and then you ruin the entire vaccine industry. >> in addition to what both russia and china have been known to spread disinformation about our vaccines which have been very effective. so thank you. i yield back my. time >> thank you for yielding back. if the vaccines were to be given away, these countries do not have the infrastructure today to start manufacturing it. so, you've given away what's been years of research and billions of dollars of private investments, you will stifle

future investments. because if the next company that maybe is on the verge of curing alzheimer's, or curing a new cancer. they see that, and it's successful, they're billions of dollars can evaporate because the president can just give it away to countries like china. he would have a stifling effect on that innovation which still can't even be used today because as you said, doctor giroir. you can contract today with those numbers, and they have the infrastructure to make those winds. those countries, china does not have the infrastructure today, do we have interest that they have the quality standards? let me ask, do you gentlemen have the time to go for some additional questions? now that we have had our first round of questions, again thank you all for coming. i will start and going back to what chairman mccaul talked about with the work that he is down on the china task force, one of the things they looked into was that as we find out further back that this started

-- there were reports that three other people who worked in the wuhan lab came out with covid-19 symptoms. at the time they did not know what it was. but they had flu like symptoms that today would fit with covid-19. first of all, have any of you gotten any information on testing that may have been done on those three workers at the wuhan lab to determine, we can go back into blitz apples and see if they have the antibodies to determine if it was covid-19? back probably in september of 2019 as opposed to december or early 2020? do any of you all know what had happened to those lab workers who, reports say, have the first potential cases? doctor quay? >> there were a few major areas of information records that the w.h.o. team wanted to look at. they actually wanted to do a few things. and those were patient records. and so no patient records for cases of covid were given, or allowed to be looked at by the

committee. they said, it's privacy. patients, and we respect our privacy laws and things. so there is information there. i have published a paper that examined a very complicated process of the 590 employees of the w. -- of the institute of virology which basically includes that there is no statistical way that they did not have positive cases. china says they didn't. the w.h.o. says they didn't. and with a 4% prevalence in wuhan in general, they should've had it just by getting it from the 7-eleven down the street. so, saying that they could not have any is a false -- >> as it led to the declassification of that information? you know, without the support of course of the -- myself. but i put the factory together with my colleagues, and the and i see, and elsewhere -- very high confidence. we put it into declassified information that there were illnesses inside the institute of a little rail -- >> what timeframe did you have?

>> i'll say that i know from another government that we had -- that win not giving any u.s. -- you know, information out. this is not information which was received by the state department. i heard it after i left the state department. i'm pretty convinced that they knew what was going on because they were working with the wuhan institute. it was made of ember, or early to mid november that their workers falling sick either with influenza or something that more else relent -- more or less resembled covid. what the exact biology this was? we don't know, we may never know. but, i do believe, having lead this effort to [inaudible] get to the bottom of this can of worms with the intelligence committee, there is a lot of data [inaudible] there's a lot of data in -- and that [inaudible] ends the state of basis, that's what's sounds -- university of washington, they recently discovered that even -- [inaudible] even in march of last year,

there were chinese calling or sending emails to nih saying, please take down the blast sequences that we've run on your data system for genetic analysis because we just want them taken. down of course, those were elements and showing that the chinese were sick or earlier than they ever admitted. and you know, may have even had evidence in some of those sequences that this was spreading in a way that would have had -- >> the important point to get, that the information. yes or no question. senate bill 13 48, which i referenced earlier. this is the bill that requires the director of national intelligence to declassify information relating to the origin of covid. again, this bill passed the united states senate unanimously, still has not come out in house. do you think it would be helpful for the world to know if we were able to declassify that information? or if we support getting disinformation? >> i know a lot of the information is classified. and i'd say that your ears will bleed. you know.

when you -- [inaudible] >> you would support declassifying this information? >> the there's pretty amazing. things but there's also a lot of information is never classified. the top sequence -- >> i know that we want to run through the rest as dr. muller, with that information declassified be useful to? us >> i believe it would be very important. >> dr. quay? >> not a determining whether or not this was a lab leak. i think that the scientific evidence isn't airing, but to find out more of the problems that were going on? yes. >> dr. quay. >> yes i would think you'd be more valuable for that. and i'd like to add, if you think we're talking about, being in the fall of november 12th 2019, three scientists in the wuhan institute virology, do you know they do? they filed a patent in china for a turn against to prevent believing if you get hit by an animal. for, so you don't get infected by the virus and the animal. november 12th 2019. >> doctor giroir?

>> i think as much as possible. i would not want to jeopardize, our sources and methods in china, because we're gonna need those. but as much as possible that we can -- that would shed light without jeopardizing our sources and methods, absolutely, 100%. >> thank you. that is what this legislation will do. hopefully gets brought up. i will go back then to the other comments that chairman mcconnell made. we had heard about these military games back in october of 2019. the military world games about 10,000 athletes from over 100 different countries participated. this was in october 18 to 27th of 2019, and yes of all places, wuhan china. many of those athletes reported flu like symptoms at the time covid-19 was not known for testing purposes to determine if that was. it it looks like they may have been the case.

if we've been able to get information about, was that maybe the first superspreader? events the other thing was getting back to that earlier question, if we would've known in those early months, that this was a lab made genetically engineered virus, not a back to animal to human virus, if we would've known that at the beginning when china knew its, could that have saved lives here in america and throughout the? world >> second question first, whether it was laboratory derived or natural. if we would've had open access the moment that is started spreading, we could've saved lives. secondly, if we knew as lab derived, that will be an extra bonus for us to say, -- >> and to expedite a vaccine as well? >> and to expedite a vaccine, all of the above. the third part about the games. i have no information about it. but i will tell you that every cdc detective, and everybody at the nih started to look at that.

it could really reveal information about the origins. i don't think that we have anything in those efforts. maybe the state department does, but i don't. >> and dr. quay? >> since they were olympic style games, they should have blood samples for drug testing. and so, i pointed -- i asked david last fall, we should try to see -- because the samples should be in -- >> do we know who would have? that >> china, wuhan? >> not sure. that but i'd like to add that if i had a test tube -- i could tell you how much more virulent it is than sars. that would've been helpful if. all >> dr. muller? dr. asher and points on that? >> we were told by the army that they had no reason to be suspicious. we had trouble getting d.o.d. to give us information about. that >> these athletes, their

highly tested. i would be shocked if we don't have that data. and of course, the army, and medical systems -- and other services. >> wilkie pressing for that. thank you. will go back to mr. comer. >> thank you. the w.h.o. was supposed to be an apolitical part of the united nations at the center of a response to a global pandemic. get throughout this pandemic, the w.h.o. has shot away from placing any blame whatsoever on china. can you explain how this false claim hindered at the u.s. on the rest of the world from ramping up the proper response to this pandemic in a timely manner? >> complicated question. you know... saying the un, or the w.h.o. is not political is just... you know, it's fantasy. it is all political, right? there are people who are at the

w.h.o., nation states, who are actively promoting their own agendas, both at the w.h.o., and by subsidizing other smaller countries so that they vote together on the block. this goes everywhere from the u.s. ethical values that we are trying to promote throughout the world, including democracy. it also roast agricultural products where people are trying to use health and a certain practices to the boycott the u.s. and bring on our agricultural industry. these places are by nature a political. they can be more than, that they are political, and they are before they aren't. secondly, i'm not sure how much the w.h.o. statements influenced us, but it certainly influenced the u.s. media and social media. it's very interesting to me how that sort of selectively is taken. so, if the w.h.o. says that it could not have been a chinese lab leak, everybody agrees with that, that's the truth. but if the w.h.o. says that children under five should not

wear masks, and children under 11 only wear masks in certain circumstances, that is not picked up by the media. so, that kind of bothers me, and i wanted to point out that that dichotomy exists. it's very selective. i think the w.h.o. stands did influence the u.s. media, and thus the propaganda machine that's associated. >> and that it could not spread from human to human? >> and that it could not learn from human to human. unusual -- it was an unusual statement. very early. to be so definitive about that, it was just really taking the chinese word. because there was no information that did not suggest that. and we have all the information that we know that the contrary was true. >> one last example of that w.h.o.... in april of 2021, the w.h.o. released an entirely one-sided report which cited that he tried to examine the origins of the virus. outside scientists were given little access... and the ccp

was given full power to edit the final report. now a doctor giroir, to the u.s. amid any names to be part of investigation to? >> yes. at the recent one. and i'm glad you bring this up. because i want to emphasize that we submitted, and then went through my office, three non political career scientists with impeccable credentials who could not be tied to anything that would be offensive to the chinese aside from, there were going to seek the truth and find it. those were -- we do not know what happened to them. but all we know is that they never showed up, and only doctor daszak was allowed to be on that committee. we heard that, we could not believe it. because it is just... i don't know if it is unprecedented, it but it is pretty unprecedented that you ask the director general asks us to submit's names, we shouldn't names, go out of our way to make sure that they are completely a political, top notch, and there's an early rejection. >> so, the communist china veto those names?

>> we infer that. but we do not know that. all we know is that they have veto power, and these three names did not show up. >> but there were no americans on this team? >> well, peter daszak was the one american. >> one american? >> that's correct. and mr. daszak, did he have a relationship with a woman? lynn >> yes, and that's well-known. >> and that is a conflict of interest? >> it is an extreme conflict of interest. again, i don't know it personally. a priority there's a major conflict of interest there because his organization was the vehicle to provide much funding into the wuhan lab. and of course, would have every reason in the world to make it not so that work that he funded actually caused a worldwide pandemic. again, i don't speak for him, i don't know. but that is an appearance of the conflict of interest which is why we had independent

scientists who were not involved, fda cdc nih, who gave them the agency you want, and they were impeccable and they were rejected. that president biden re>> based justs today concerning the w.h.o. and their behavior toward the united states, their favorite-ism towards china, it's very disappointing that president biden rejoined the w.h.o. as one of his first acts as president, very disappointing without asking any questions, without demanding any transparency. very disappointing. i yield back. >> thank you. let's go back to mr. jordan. >> for the record, let me run down the line here. each of you believe that the virus started in a lab in wuhan, china? >> yes. >> yes. >> yes. >> and each of you believe by

definition that it's man-made, engineered? >> not correct. >> it's very unlikely this was found in nature, but it could be brought to a population center of around 11 million, which is kind of crazy, and when you say man-made, it could have been naturally evolved, which is what was suggested earlier. it's not like humans putting pieces together -- >> what do you think is more likely? humans engineering it, or what you just described? >> this is speculation, but i think more likely, it was evolved by passage either in cells or by humanized mice to have a very virulent pathogen, at least a majority of which.

but it's still the same thing, whether i -- still a lab -- >> it's still considered gain of function research? >> yes, if you are passing it to gain of function, that's gain of function. >> and do we get to answer? >> i saw head shakes from everyone. >> gain of function is where a virus is brought in and there is something called gain of opportunity, where you go out into caves and things and bring them back to a population center. you make it as million times as many copies in one dish and the person doing that has a chance of getting infected.

gain of opportunity is a virus that escapes. >> but we haven't found this being a natural virus? >> of course not. it is a gain of function. without any doubt. >> i would say that the evidence that this was created by manipulation, by gene splicing, as well as a gain of function, is compelling beyond reasonable doubt. the scientific evidence is very strong, remarkably strong. >> you think it's engineered? >> yes. basically, i have been involved in many scientific discoveries, and i have never seen such compelling evidence, even from those -- >> that's when i was getting at. >> i just want to ask how much

intelligence there is coming out of nature. i am interested in that answer. >> if we had known it was from the lab, and as the doctor points out, engineered, i think you said earlier that would have helped us save lives. is that true? who >> i do believe that. if there wasn't a cover-up, we could have saved lives. if we knew it was lap derived and they were transparent, i am just hearing about the interferon right here. it's such a key issue. if you get fever and get sick because a man interferon response that was deliberately engineered to block that, not only does that become more infectious, but it means you will be asymptomatic. that could have been a major,

major, important finding for us to know early if that were true. >> you believe we would have saved lives had we known earlier? >> yes. in 72 hours, i could have predicted all the transmission from the virus itself. >> do you think that would have helped to save lives? >> i have no scientific expertise on this. i have my own personal opinion, but i defer to dr. quay on these issues. >> doctor asher? >> the question is did we know and not process the data. certainly at the state department, we would like to have known if the chinese were working on the kinds of research that it later turned out they were.

>> so we might have known, but didn't actually know. it's a weird thing, like 9/11. >> to get to the point i wanted to make, dr. fauci was on notice on february 1st. he was on notice on january 31st. we got an email where the scientists to get american taxpayer dollars send an email saying the unusual features of the virus make up a small part of the genome, so looking at the features indicates that they look engineered. the top guy in our government for the last year and a half knew on january 31st, 2020. he also knew this sentence. we all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. so we were on notice back on january 31st. i think the guy who was on

notice downplayed this and manufactured an article to keep the american people from knowing this. >> we were on notice and 2017 with the french government. those of us following technology knew about this. >> that's different. >> it's a little different. this is a guy in our government -- >> it's his counterpart in france. >> doctor, let me ask you a question. earlier today, you talked about this came from the lab and the question is is it just a lead from the lab or a bio weapon. and i want you to talk to us about that. the assumption for most of us has been it's a leak, but you

are the one who raised the term bioweapon and you have been at the state department for over 25 years in and out, educated at oxford, cornell. tell me your answer to was it just a lab leak. >> we were working on a program related to synthetic biology using convalescent merry technology approaches. quite publicly, it was related to their future of hybrid warfare. they were working on dual use research of concerns. and the durk, could result in a weapons like release. whether they deliberately did it, i have very little sense

they did. but were they deliberately working on developing the capability to use this to advance capabilities of war in a way no one has ever seen employed? of course. that's with the chinese have been talking about publicly. and there shouldn't be any surprise as to why no one paid attention. >> i think earlier, doctor giroir, you mentioned something about human dna and an american going to china. can you fill me in? >> as doctor asher talked about export controls for biotechnology, and i know he knows this as well or better than i do, but it's not just technology, but information and our genetic information is actually critical. i do assess that the chinese had set up circumstances that they are doing a lot of our gene sequencing of americans through normal labs and studies at the nih.

genetic sequences are powerful. they know our vulnerabilities. it's the first step in devising a potentially ethnic weapon, as was discussed by dr. asher, and i don't know if it's still the case, you will not see any genetic sequences of chinese exported out of the country. that's a law. there is a reason for that. when we talk about export technology, export of genetic information may be the most important key that we need to stop. >> so american genetic information is going to china, the same china doctor asher talked about as doing bioweapon research with this stuff, and you are saying this combination is of particular concern? >> it is an absolutely huge concern from where i set. i have been out of the formal bioweapon's defense part of the government for a period of time,

but genetic information is very powerful. it decides who we are and tells about our vulnerabilities, not only diseased, but potential for genetic weapons. what i mean is there are variations in receptors that very by population, and those can potentially be exploited so that a new pathogen would deferentially target a race, a european ancestry, versus someone else, and we are essentially just giving all that information to china in the context of what i do believe is an unprecedented -- >> what's the rationale for giving that to china? why are we giving all this information to china? >> because most people in the community are either naive to the threat, denied the threat, are oblivious to the threat, or just a hot to think about it.

it's not that they are evil and giving it to them, but they just don't understand what is happening in china and other places, and they are providing it in a naive fashion across the board. i just wanted to point out that genetic information, and i hope the doctor would agree with this, but genetic information is one of those things that we should be keeping as a vital national security secret, and not providing it to adversary nations who wish to develop weapons, even openly, in the literature. >> if i can make a comment on this? >> yes. >> i know what he is saying. if you go on the internet, and you can do dna tests for anything on the internet as a consumer and you don't even need a doctor. you do a scrape, a spit, the specimen will go to a lab here, but then it gets shipped to be

gi, adam -- they will do the sequence there and send it back to the company. but they will keep a copy. that's what he is talking about. every time an american, not always, but many times, you will go to a u.s. address and then it gets shipped to bgi. >> and that brings us to the conclusion of this hearing. let me think our four witnesses. you were all experts in your field and brought some incredibly rebutting testimony, some concerning testimony stressed since that. more of these questions need to be asked and we should be getting answers from the others who didn't come forward, because there are a lot more questions to be answered about the origins of covid-19. i think it's been very clear from all of your respective testimony that the origins of

covid-19 came from a lab, whether it was engineered from i.c.e., was there a host like a bat, but the bottom line is we need to be asking more of these questions, especially to people who do you have these answers, and there are some people who have these answers who chose not to come. i would urge our counterparts in the majority party to hold a bipartisan hearing where subpoena powers would be involved, where we can compel witnesses for no information that has not been put on the table to come forward. and we found a lot of facts today. facts are very helpful and show that if china was just forthright really off in this process going back to september, october of