Senate stumped over COVID origins: What we know – and don’t know

Reel back to June 2021. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green, R-Tenn., did not yet wield the committee gavel. But he had questions about COVID-19, which gripped the planet.

"For most of the pandemic, anyone who raised questions about the origin of the virus was dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theorist," opined Green on the House floor.

Many were even reluctant to dip into the idea that COVID-19 could have come from a lab in China in 2021.

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Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Calif., is a doctor and the top Democrat on the House panel investigating the start of the pandemic. Some Republicans touted the lab leak theory. Yet Ruiz was careful to note that the concept was far from proven. The Department of Energy and FBI suggested a lab leak was the culprit. But most U.S. intelligence agencies suspected the virus emanated from nature.

"They do not strongly with high confidence say that this was a lab leak," said Ruiz at a July 2023 hearing. "But we heard that they do from the other side. That’s a lie."

Like Green, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, R-N.Y., argued in 2023 that Democrats "accused everyone who believes that there was a lab leak to be a conspiracy theorist."

But the theory of a lab leak potentially sparking the pandemic no longer flits around the fringes.

The House COVID committee unearthed a message last year from Dr. David Morens – an associate of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci was the public face of the pandemic response. He just retired as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Morens wrote that "Tony doesn’t want his fingerprints on origin stories."

In an appearance on Fox in January 2023, Fauci declared that "the