US health official rebuts lab leak talk

The acting head of the United States' National Institutes of Health said viruses studied at a Wuhan laboratory in China did not show any resemblance to the COVID-19 virus that eventually spread around the world.

Dr Lawrence Tabak told a panel of the US House of Representatives on Wednesday that to suggest otherwise would be like "saying that a human is equivalent to a cow".

He made his comments at a hearing before members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, led by Republicans who now control the House.

The NIH is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services and the largest biomedical research agency in the world.

The suspicions put forth by Republicans at the hearing revolve around $8 million in NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was collaborating on coronavirus research with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the city where COVID-19 was first reported.

NIH officials have long maintained that the viruses studied in Wuhan could not have possibly been the source of SARS-CoV-2 or the COVID-19 pandemic, which Tabak reiterated on Wednesday, and said there is no direct evidence linking the Wuhan laboratory to the start of the pandemic.

Republicans accused Tabak and two other top Biden administration officials — Dr Robert M. Califf, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — of blocking their requests for information, imposing unnecessary vaccine mandates and eroding people's faith in public health institutions. China has frequently rebutted accusations that the pandemic originated in Wuhan. China has accused those critics of seeking to blame it for the pandemic and politicizing an issue that should be left to scientists.

'Extremely unlikely'

In February 2021, a team of experts from the World Health Organization said it was "extremely unlikely" that the coronavirus leaked from the lab. The head of a team of experts, Dr Peter Ben Embarek, released the first details of its fact-finding mission into the virus' origins. Embarek said it was more likely that the virus had jumped to humans from an animal.

The theory that the virus was introduced into the human population as a result of a lab accident did not warrant future study, he added.

In July 2021, China said it could not accept a WHO plan for a second phase of a study into the origins of COVID-19.

Zeng Yixin, vice-minister of the National Health Commission, said then that he was "rather taken aback" that the plan includes further investigation of the theory that the virus might have leaked from the lab in Wuhan.

He dismissed the lab leak idea as a rumor that runs counter to common sense and science.

Yuan Zhiming, director of the biosafety lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said they had not stored or studied the new coronavirus before the outbreak.

In May 2021, US President Joe Biden directed the US intelligence community to produce a report on the origins of COVID-19 within 90 days. The two-page, unclassified summary of the report stated that US investigators "judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon", but they do not rule out natural exposure to the virus, nor a laboratory accident as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.

"Justice will prevail, and injustice is doomed to fail," China's Vice-Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu said in a statement about the report, noting that Beijing had made serious protests to Washington over it.

Washington has failed to respond to global concerns and the calls for a complete investigation of more than 200 US-led biolabs located across the globe, he said.

In doing so, the US "attempts to cover up facts and shirk its responsibilities", and it should "face up to the global community with a clear response", he said.