The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a congressional hearing today and took testimony from a couple of people about the lab leak theory. One of those was former DNI John Ratcliffe who has said previously that he believes the lab leak is the only plausible explanation for the virus. The other was former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs David Feith.

One thing which was highlighted by both Ratcliffe and Feith in their testimony was the importance of some information that was revealed in a State Department fact sheet at the end of the Trump administration. Feith talked about this in his opening statement.

On January 15, after interagency clearance of the document and consultations the week before with key allies, we released a Fact Sheet on “Activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology” and an accompanying Press Statement on “Ensuring a Transparent, Thorough Investigation of COVID-19’s Origin.” As summarized in the Press Statement, we revealed:

Illnesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV): The United States government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID19 and common seasonal illnesses. This raises questions about the credibility of WIV senior researcher Shi Zhengli’s public claim that there was “zero infection” among the WIV’s staff and students of SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-related viruses.

Near the end of his statement he added that those sick researchers were the key:

The sick lab researchers identified in the January 2021 Fact Sheet remain the best lead yet into who or what may have been Patient Zero. There is no animal anywhere that has been identified as a comparably likely source of the outbreak. (China’s former CDC director, George Gao, confirmed as much again last week.) The Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, has more information about the sick researchers and their circumstances than has been released.

During his testimony, Feith was asked by Rep. Debbie Lesko if he could share any more information about the sick researchers in Wuhan. He replied, “What we know is that there is additional information that the US government has that was not able to be specified at the time in the fact sheet that was released in January of 2021.”

Moments later, Rep. John Joyce was asking former DNI Ratcliffe about the dissemination of information about COVID early on. Ratcliffe resplied, “With respect to China, it is not unusual for local officials to actually suppress intelligence from national leaders until a problem can be arrested or remediated.” He then went on to discuss the illnesses of the WIV. Listen to the rest of his answer about the sick researchers at the WIV:

“There has been public reporting about intelligence that those researchers became patients and were hospitalized,” he said. He continued, “Without confirming the accuracy of that what I would submit to you is, if that is in fact the case and those hospitalizations took place the lab results and tests from those patients, if submitted for genetic sequencing, would be dispositive of the issue of whether or not those initial patient zeroes worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“I would submit to you that in China there are not HIPAA considerations that prevent the Chinese government from accessing that. I would submit to you that if this took place they have the answers to that and I would submit to you that if the answers were exculpatory in nature that information would have been shared by the Chinese government which it has not.”

There were reportedly three WIV researchers who got sick and wound up in the hospital in 2019. However, China had a very bad flu season that year so some people have suggested their illnesses could have been a garden variety flu. But in August of 2021 Josh Rogin gave an interview to Bari Weiss in which he revealed some information that hadn’t been made public before:

“The unreleased intelligence is the stuff that, if you read John Ratcliffe’s op-ed recently, that he is talking about,” Rogin said. He added, “What he wrote is that the secret intelligence, the stuff that they didn’t release, it’s even more damning, has lots of specifics about the lab. Now I happen to know what some of that is and I’ll tell it to you right now, okay.”

“What it says is that the symptoms that these sick researchers had were not your everyday flu symptoms,” Rogin said. He continued, “In other words, they were COVID specific symptoms necessarily and these include no smell and what are called ground-glass opacities in the lungs.

“That doesn’t medically prove that they had COVID but that’s some pretty specific symptoms.”

As I noted at the time, loss of smell can be caused by other infections and “ground-glass opacities” in the lungs can also be consistent with other types of lung infections. So none of this is proof but these symptoms are also consistent with COVID, which is interesting.

A trained doctor could probably look at an x-ray of the lungs of one of these patients and say if those opacities looked like COVID or not. Presumably China has all those test results but as former DNI Ratcliffe pointed out, for some reason they haven’t decided to share them.