Republicans on House E&C Committee urge NIH to join investigation into COVID-19 origins

Pointing the finger firmly at China in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, Republican leaders on the House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committee have written to the National Institutes of Health, urging its experts to join them in an independent investigation of the disease’s origins.

As the Biden administration met with Chinese officials last week in Alaska, E&C Republican Leader Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Republican Leader Morgan Griffith (R-VA), and Health Subcommittee Republican Leader Brett Guthrie (R-KY) sent correspondence to NIH Director Francis Collins over the lack of transparency from the Chinese government, and declaring a new investigation into the pandemic’s roots to be of paramount importance to public health and biosecurity.

“Because of rising tensions between the U.S. and China, the WHO scrapped plans for an interim report,” the lawmakers wrote. “An international group of science experts, including specialists in virology, microbiology, and zoology, asked for a new review. The NIH, as a premier scientific institution, must lead in order to foster a transparent, independent, and science-based investigation into the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Such an effort must meet the WHO’s stated goals of an open-minded investigation that does not exclude any plausible hypothesis. In addition, the NIH is well-positioned to gather and provide information through oversight of its grants and other federal awards. Thus, the NIH is in a unique position to investigate the possibility that the pandemic stemmed from a laboratory accident or leak, especially regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).”

As the pandemic raged, the World Health Organization (WHO) dispatched more than a dozen scientists to China to join counterparts there in determining how COVID-19 started. China initially resisted international calls for an investigation, delaying a probe for months and allowing investigators in, but only with the understanding that it has veto power over participants. As a result, claims have spread that the WHO investigation faced restricted ability to pursue an impartial or thorough investigation.

Among other things, the Republican lawmakers requested the NIH to provide a trove of documents of its internal knowledge and interactions informing the topic, to brief the Minority Committee staff on any information on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, and to create a working group dedicated to studying the origins of COVID-19.