Written by Brett Wilkins
House Minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, in his latest blog addition, has cited his concerns with the lack of accountability the United States has placed on China with recent information about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.
With Democrats controlling the House, Senate, and the White House, any action to censure or punish China must be a bipartisan action. So far, Democrats have shown little effort to hold China accountable after the pandemic has claimed almost 600k American lives.
President Biden began an investigation into the origins of the pandemic in May and has directed the U.S. Intelligence agencies to “redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion”.
With the Wall Street Journal reporting that three researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), sought hospital care in November of 2019, the lab leak theory perpetuated by many Republicans including the former President Donald Trump, have begun to gather greater attention and serious consideration.
In a report published by the previous administration’s Department of State, we know that the WIV, Starting in at least 2016 – and with no indication of a stop prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, conducting “experiments involving RaTG13, the bat coronavirus identified by the WIV in January 2020 as its closest sample to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% similar)”. The report also states that “The WIV has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function” research to engineer chimeric viruses. But the WIV has not been transparent or consistent about its record of studying viruses most similar to the COVID-19 virus, including ‘RaTG13,’ which it sampled from a cave in Yunnan Province in 2013 after several miners died of SARS-like illness.”
Kevin McCarthy in his newsletter published on June 21st cited a report from the University of Southampton that concluded: “cases could have been reduced by 66 percent, 86 percent and 95 percent… if interventions in China could have been conducted one, two, or three weeks earlier respectively”.
To “deliver transparency and justice to the American people”, McCarthy has constructed an eight-step plan:
- Declassification of Intelligence
- Prohibit Gain of Function Research in and with China
- Prohibition on National Institutes of Health (NIH) Funding to Malevolent Foreign Governments
- WHO Overhaul and Counterintelligence Investigation
- Investigations and Utilizing Existing Authorities
- Visa Restrictions and Sanctions
- Waiving Chinese Sovereign Immunity
- Relocation of the 24th Olympic Winter Games
