House panel concludes COVID likely leaked from lab

WASHINGTON — COVID-19 killed more than 1.2 million Americans after likely leaking from a Chinese lab that was in part funded by US taxpayers, a House panel has concluded — following President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to make Beijing pay trillions in “reparations” for allowing the virus to spread. “Four years after the onset of the worst pandemic in 100 years, the weight of the evidence increasingly supports the lab leak hypothesis,” the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic determined in a 520-page report. The finding wasn’t a surprise — after the FBI, the Energy Department’s National Laboratories and former federal officials like Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe reached the same conclusion. But the report adds weight to the theory with additional analysis from former senior government officials and reiterates the fact that risky gain-of-function experiments funded by federal grants were being conducted at the epicenter of the outbreak in Wuhan, China. Trump, 78, has recently argued for a heavier hand in getting answers and accountability out of Beijing — after retiring President Biden never mentioned an interest in transparency during public portions of his three summit meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping, though he claimed he did...