The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenaed 14 agencies in mid-January about the origin of Covid-19 and risky research conducted at a lab in China with U.S. funding, its chair, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), announced Monday.
The list of agencies includes the National Institutes of Health, the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI and the CIA, among others.
The subpoenas were issued in the last days of the Biden administration and before the CIA announced it had decided that it was more likely a lab leak that caused the pandemic than an infected animal that spread the virus to people. Previously, the CIA had said it couldn’t conclude with certainty how the pandemic started.
Paul said he still needs answers about who at NIH allowed U.S. funds to be spent at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese research facility in the city where Covid first emerged, in the wake of former President Joe Biden giving a preemptive pardon to Anthony Fauci, the long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
NIAID, part of NIH, funded research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute.
Paul also said he wanted to know why that grant, to the U.S.-based EcoHealth Alliance, wasn’t scrutinized by a committee in charge of assessing risky research, which involves making certain pathogens deadlier or more transmissible. EcoHealth collaborated with the Wuhan Institute on coronavirus research. HHS this month banned EcoHealth and its former president, Peter Daszak, from receiving U.S. funding for the next five years.
“The goal of the investigation will be to critique the process that allowed this dangerous research, that may have led to the pandemic, to occur in a foreign country under unsafe protocols and to ensure that there is sufficient oversight and review going forward, making sure a mistake of this magnitude never happens again,” Paul said in a statement.
Fauci and other NIH officials have testified in congressional hearings that the research in Wuhan did not meet the criteria of risky research known as “gain-of-function” that the panel Paul referred to, the P3CO committee, reviews.
Fauci and the officials have also said the research conducted in Wuhan couldn’t have sparked the pandemic because the virus Chinese researchers were experimenting with was far different than the one that causes Covid.
Why it matters: Paul’s announcement is part of a wider effort by congressional Republicans to investigate whether the pandemic started due to a lab leak, as many of them believe.
His requests for information are likely to get a more welcome reception from the agencies now that President Donald Trump is in charge of them.
Three U.S. intelligence agencies — the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Energy — lean toward the lab leak theory, albeit with low or moderate confidence, while other intelligence agencies back the natural origin theory or can’t come to a conclusion.
There’s no conclusive proof for either theory.
Nonetheless, Paul wants to better regulate risky research funded by the U.S. government.
The Homeland Security Committee approved his Risky Research Review Act, with near unanimous support during the last congressional term.
Paul told POLITICO last week that he plans to reintroduce it in committee and that he is working with counterparts in the House to have a companion bill introduced there.
