U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) recently announced that she has called for an investigation to determine the origin of COVID-19 and believes additional oversight is necessary for research funding.
"The Chinese Communist Party must be held accountable for their role in the pandemic. I called for an independent investigation into COVID origins, and introduced legislation to increase oversight on research funding. We will get transparency in a GOP Majority!" Stefanik wrote in a Twitter post on Tuesday.
According to a press release from Stefanik's office, in May 2021, Stefanik was one of 209 House Republicans who sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calling for an investigation to determine the origins of COVID-19.
“We request that you instruct the appropriate Democrat committee chairs to immediately join Republican calls to hold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accountable for its role in causing the global COVID-19 pandemic,” the letter said in part. “There is mounting evidence the pandemic started in a Chinese lab, and the CCP covered it up. If that is the case, the CCP is responsible for the deaths of almost 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide. These questions about the CCP’s liability are not a diversion, as you falsely claimed. To the contrary, every American family that lost someone deserves answers about the origin of this terrible virus, and House Democrats’ ongoing refusal to allocate investigative resources to get those answers is an affront to them.”
Stefanik criticized the CCP as early as March 2020 for spreading "propaganda" and trying to shift the blame for the origin of the virus to the U.S. or other countries, Adirondack Daily Enterprise reported.
“We need to speak out loudly and clearly among our allies to push back on that propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party,” Stefanik said.
She dismissed criticism from people who claimed it was racist to refer to the coronavirus as the "Chinese virus," saying, "This virus originated in China. That’s a fact. It is not racist to say that it originated in Wuhan or that it originated in China.”
In March 2021, Stefanik cosponsored the Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act, stating at the time, "The COVID-19 virus that has taken more than 500,000 American lives and crippled our economy may have originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. It is absolutely unacceptable for American taxpayer dollars to be funding the lab and any Chinese Communist Party entities, period."
EcoHealth Alliance gave approximately $598,500 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2015 and 2019. The legislation she cosponsored would bar EcoHealth Alliance from receiving federal funding.
Stefanik is a cosponsor of the Countering Communist China Act, which recognizes China and the CCP as the United States' top national security threat and aims to counter China's malign influence and theft of intellectual property. One provision of the legislation would require the declassification of information related to the origin of COVID-19, determine whether China's role constitutes use of a biological weapon and seek reimbursement from China for the funds the U.S. government used to mitigate the pandemic.
A recent report from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health indicates that the virus likely originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, which is separated from the Wuhan Virology Institute by a river.
