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... The House Oversight and Accountability Committee's COVID-19 panel, controlled by Republicans, issued its 520-page report two years after its investigation began and ahead of a hearing this week.

The report affirmed what has long been the leading theory, stating that a "lab-related incident" involving gain-of-function research in Wuhan is the most likely origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Researchers had initially suggested that the virus emerged in nature and jumped from animals to people, probably at a wildlife market in Wuhan.

"Four years after the onset of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis," the report stated.

The coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan in December 2019 before spreading worldwide and killing around 7 million people. FBI Director Christopher Wray has previously said the agency assessed that a leak from a lab in Wuhan "most likely caused the COVID-19 pandemic."

The report cites several reasons to back the conclusion, including that the lab in Wuhan is home to China's foremost SARS research lab, the lab had a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels and that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before it was discovered at the wet market.

The report also further implicates New York nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance of using U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. ...