Edited by: TJVNews.com

A controversial new Senate report led by North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr was released Thursday. Fox News reported that the interim report argues that the “likely” origin of the COVID-19 pandemic was a “research-related incident” in China.

“While precedent of previous outbreaks of human infections from contact with animals favors the hypothesis that a natural zoonotic spillover is responsible for the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 that resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic was most likely the result of a research-related incident,” the report’s introduction reads. “This conclusion is not intended to be dispositive. The lack of transparency from government and public health officials in the PRC with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion.”

The report also said, “Natural zoonotic spillovers are a sequential process.  In this process, an animal virus must evolve in order to become a human-adapted virus. First, a virus infects animals. Second, those infected animals come into contact with humans (known as the human-animal interface). Third, the virus is able to infect humans. Fourth, the virus is able to adapt to efficiently transmit between humans. Thus, a spillover event, in which disease is spread from animal to human, can result in one of two outcomes—either the pathogen, once transmitted from animals, is then transmitted from humans to humans, or the pathogen does not spread, resulting in a “dead-end” spillover. In many respects, once human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV2 was established, the onward human-to-human transmission of the virus would look similar regardless of whether it originated from a natural zoonotic spillover or a research-related incident.”

In a release, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, of which Burr is ranking member, says there is “substantial evidence” suggesting that this was the cause of the pandemic, and that a research-related incident is consistent with early epidemiology showing the spread of the virus in the same district as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Fox News reported.

The senators cited a pattern of “persistent biosafety problems” at the institute and said that there are evidentiary “gaps” in scientific research that point to a natural zoonotic spillover from animals sold at a market in Wuhan.

“Such gaps include the failure to identify the original host reservoir, the failure to identify a candidate intermediate host species and the lack of serological or epidemiological evidence showing transmission from animals to humans, among others outlined in this report. As a result of these evidentiary gaps, it is hard to treat the natural zoonotic spillover theory as the presumptive origin of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the committee said.

Fox News also reported that the committee said the report was a review to date of publicly available, open-source information related to the pandemic’s potential origin.

The 35-page document cites The Associated Press, the World Health Organization (WHO), The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Nature, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Science, among others, according to the Fox News report.

In June of this year, the WHO recommended that further inquiry was required to determine the pandemic’s origin – a reversal of the agency’s initial assessment. The WHO concluded in 2021 that it was “extremely unlikely” coronavirus might have spilled into Wuhan residents due to a lab, as was reported by Fox News.

The scientists said this year that the group would “remain open to any and all scientific evidence that becomes available in the future to allow for comprehensive testing of all reasonable hypotheses,” as was reported by Fox News.

Some had complained that the possibility of a lab leak was too readily downplayed.

However, just a month later, two peer-review studies in the academic journal Science made the case that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was likely the pandemic’s epicenter, Fox News reported.

In one of those studies, University of Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobrey and his colleagues used mapping tools to estimate the locations of more than 150 of the earliest known COVID-19 cases from December 2019.

“Of all the locations that the early cases could have lived, where did they live? And it turned out when we were able to look at this, there was this extraordinary pattern where the highest density of cases was both extremely near to and very centered on this market,” Worobrey said at a press briefing, as was reported by Fox News. “Crucially, this applies both to all cases in December and also to cases with no known link to the market … And, this is an indication that the virus started spreading in people who worked at the market but then started to spread into the local community.”

The second study analyzed the genomic diversity of the virus inside and outside of China, finding that two lineages marked the pandemic’s start in Wuhan.

“The presence of potential animal reservoirs, coupled with the timing of the lineage B primary case and the geographic clustering of early cases around the Huanan market, support the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 lineage B jumped into humans at the Huanan market in mid-November 2019,” wrote UCSD bioinformatics graduate student Jonathan Pekar, according to the Fox News report. “In a related study, we show that the two earliest lineage A’s cases are more closely positioned geographically to the Huanan market than expected compared with other COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in early 2020, despite having no known association with the market.”

It suggested that there were two – and potentially more – spillovers of the virus from animals at the market.