There appears to be bipartisan agreement on the House Intelligence Committee that there is not enough evidence to determine the origins of the coronavirus pandemic due to the refusal of the Chinese government to cooperate.
Committee Chair Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and ranking member, Jim Himes, D-Conn., appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday to make that point.
"There's no direct evidence; we don't have China admitting it; we don't have Wuhan lab handing these things over," Turner said.
The discussion comes on the heels of recent reports that the Department of Energy concluded that COVID-19 most likely started with an accidental leak in the Wuhan laboratory, which is also the position of the FBI. However, other governmental agencies have said they think it was probably due to natural transmission from animals to humans, according to Politico.
"We have so few facts that, inevitably, different agencies are going to arrive at different conclusions," Himes told "Meet the Press."
Mirroring the position of his Republican colleague, Himes added, "We have so few facts because the Chinese regime has obfuscated."
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on Sunday also blamed China for its refusal to be open about the situation, telling "Fox News Sunday," "If this virus had originated virtually anywhere else, we would have had world scientists there."
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said last week that the U.S. government still had not reached a consensus on how the pandemic started, Politico reported.
Leana Wen, a professor at George Washington University, told CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on Sunday, "I think at this point there is circumstantial evidence on both sides. But there is one thing that the intelligence community has found — and, in fact, has been unanimously saying since early on — which is that this was not intentional."
Wen said the intelligence community has found that "this was not a bioweapon or something that China or scientists or whatever politicians or political leaders were trying to do."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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