More than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic erupted and upended lives all over the world. Republican Senator Tom Cotton is still seeking answers. Over the weekend, he spoke to FOX News' Maria Bartiromo to discuss a letter he and several other Republican senators penned to National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins to explain how and why the U.S. got involved in funding gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology back in 2014.
The letter, which according to The Blaze had been co-signed by seven other senators including Republican Sens. Rand Paul, Ron Johnson and James Lankford, called upon the NIH to show records relating to the 2014 moratorium that defined gain of function research as "research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route."
The letter also asked the NIH why such research was launched in the first place. Sen. Cotton accused top infectious disease health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci of denying such research, saying that he was "playing word games." As per FOX News, Sen. Cotton alleged that NIH had indeed provided funding to an "American organization," which was found to be EcoHealth Alliance, that provided "hundreds of thousands of dollars to these Wuhan labs to investigate coronaviruses and to find ways to make them more contagious and more dangerous."
Sen. Cotton questioned why the NIH would provide funding to EcoHealth Alliance "during a time in which the Obama Administration had explicitly banned this kind of gain of function research." Now, the Republican senator is placing the responsibility of an investigation on the Biden administration, especially when more and more scientists and credible health experts are looking into a "viable" theory that COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan virology lab.
According to the Post Millennial, Sen. Cotton made his theory on the COVID-19 origins known back in February 2020, when he found through a review of data that the virus may have circulated earlier than what the Chinese government and the World Health Organization reported. The data showed that mobile phones and roads surrounding the Wuhan virology lab were shut down for weeks. At the time, former President Donald Trump had the same belief, saying that he had "a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the origin for this virus."
But the mainstream media was quick to cast doubt over this theory. However, more and more damning evidence is coming to light that this may have been the case. Earlier, reports said the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission indicated that COVID-19 first spread within a residential area between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China's Biological Preparations Institute. And just this weekend, U.S. intelligence revealed that several Wuhan researchers reported to have fallen very ill in November of 2019, requiring hospital care well before the outbreak was declared towards the end of December.
Unconvinced at the results of the WHO's investigation into the pandemic, a team of scientists are calling for a new look into the matter. The Biden administration is also pushing for an independent investigation into the true origins of COVID-19.
