A report released this week by House Republicans investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic is "just the beginning of where we need to be going," Rep. Brad Wenstrup, the lawmaker leading the House GOP investigation, said on Newsmax Saturday.
"The intelligence community just came out with their report," the Ohio Republican told Newsmax's "Saturday Agenda."
"They had a classified report and unclassified updated assessment, and some of this stuff in the updated assessment doesn't even agree with what they have in the classified assessment."
But in both assessments, Wenstrup noted, there was a broad agreement that "there's no way that we don't believe that they were developing COVID-19 as a bioweapon in China," even though the reports don't give a level of confidence in the conclusion, as is usually done.
"It was reported in November of 2019 that there were safety issues in the lab in Wuhan and also let's point out some of the things we know," said Wenstrup.
"The Academy of Military Medical Science in China has a subset to it called the Fifth Institute [which] focuses on coronaviruses and bioweapons. They are related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2020 and 2005 our State Department came out and said that the Chinese were working on an offensive weapon or working on offensive bioweapons."
Meanwhile, in 2015, the Chinese published a book questioning whether the SARS virus was natural or created, and even the title of the book speaks about using human viruses as potential bioweapons, or "genetic bioweapons," said Wenstrup.
"They've had all these connections," he said. "We have all these things that are out there and what's even more frightening is we have been funding the National Institutes of Health, which send funds to places like EcoHealth Alliance, which is doing this research with the Chinese, U.S., and Chinese together, creating coronaviruses and viruses that are what we consider gain of function."
Many Democrats are also "getting just as upset" with the intelligence community for lack of transparency, even though they initially dismissed calls to learn the origins of the COVID pandemic, Wenstrup said.
"As a physician, you want to know the origins of something like this," said Wenstrup, a medical doctor, adding that the matter is also one of national defense.
"I don't understand whether or not they are talking about it," he said. "Maybe they are, privately, but I haven't seen any of that and I certainly would think it's something that we want to address. It's for the best of mankind, really as we move forward."
It also has not been fully determined how Dr. Anthony Fauci will play into the investigation, said Wenstrup.
"He hasn't been asked the right kind of questions," he said, noting that Fauci was asked back in 2014 about gain of function research and a virus escaping a lab, and had responded that the benefits of the research outweighed the risks.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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