US report to prove laboratory accident in China

WELT US report to prove laboratory accident in China 1 day • 2 minutes reading time How did SARS-CoV-2 come into the world, triggering a global pandemic? Members of the US House of Representatives have now presented a report to support the laboratory accident theory. 30 experts were interviewed and over a million documents were reviewed. At the end of 2019, the first people in China fell ill with Covid-19, triggered by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 After a two-year investigation into the origin of the corona pandemic, US representatives have presented a report to prove the theory of a laboratory accident in China. The SARS-CoV-2 virus "probably arose as a result of a laboratory or research accident," said the 520-page report by a subcommittee of the House of Representatives. The committee bases its findings on 30 interviews and the review of more than a million pages of documents. The US virologist and the government's top corona advisor, Anthony Fauci, was also interviewed. The Republicans accuse the 83-year-old of having passed on funds to Chinese scientists who are said to have genetically engineered the coronavirus. When questioned in June, Fauci argued that it was "molecularly impossible" for the bat viruses examined in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, to transform into the virus that then caused the pandemic. Fauci was a member of the government's corona crisis team under both US President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump. While his expertise was highly valued by parts of the public, the New York native repeatedly attracted the displeasure of Trump, who downplayed the danger posed by the coronavirus for a long time. Fauci was attacked by right-wing circles and had to be placed under police protection. Laboratory accident or transmission through animals? US federal agencies, the World Health Organization (WHO) and scientists around the world have come to different conclusions about the origin of the coronavirus: Most of them believe that the virus spread from animals in China. In contrast, an investigation by the US intelligence service last year found that the virus may have been genetically modified and escaped from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first coronavirus infections in humans occurred. The coronavirus pandemic killed 1.1 million people in the US. According to WHO figures from 2023, the number of deaths worldwide was 20 million. The coronavirus had spread from China to all over the world since the end of 2019 and, in addition to the high number of victims around the globe, caused lockdowns, travel restrictions and many other serious effects.