Fortenberry Questions Virus Answers

Washington, D.C.  (June 7, 2021)  Nebraska First District Congressman Jeff Fortenberry says a better, independent investigation of the Covid 19 Pandemic’s origin needs to be conducted.  Fortenberry questions the information provided by the Chinese Government.  He expressed optimism that the nation is getting control of the virus, but said much more work remains.

“As we make this hard-earned turn, a critical piece of COVID business remains: how do we prevent a global viral travesty from happening again?  ”

Fortenberry said the investigation needs to begin by understanding how COVID-19 originated and quickly spread, and who bears responsibility.  The prevailing assumption, he said,  has been that the virus jumped from bats to another species before leaping to humans at the Huanan wholesale market in Wuhan, China, where some early COVID cases appeared.

“This “wet market” theory oddly persists even though bats were not sold at the Huanan Market, an intermediary animal host for the viral transfer to humans has not been found, and the extreme unlikelihood of inter-species transmission from bats, located 900 miles away from Wuhan, in the middle of a Wuhan winter in which bats would be hibernating.  To date, no bat population with the novel coronavirus has ever been located.   In fact, no human or animal was ever found with the virus before 2019. ”

The State’s First District Congressman said the Chinese investigation was suspicious.

“Just as the wet market theory was being put to the test last year, the Chinese government destroyed lab samples from the Huanan Market, shuttered the market, and sent a team of Wall Street Journal investigative reporters looking into the theory packing. ”

Fortenberry said another theory is worth investigation.  He called it the leaky lab theory.

“Recent intelligence suggests that three researchers from the WIV became ill with COVID-like symptoms and sought hospital care in November 2019, a full month before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) publicly reported the country’s first COVID-19 case.  As U.S. intelligence lends increased credibility to the lab-leak thesis, experts in Washington are sounding less dismissive.  Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was recently asked if he was convinced COVID-19 developed naturally.  He replied: ‘no, actually, I am not convinced about that.  I think we should . . . investigate what went on in China’.”

Fortenberry says he has signed on to a letter to several Congressional Committee Chairs urging them to seriously review what he called mounting evidence of Chinese culpability.

“Knowing how the Chinese Communist Party politicized the World Health Organization (WHO), silenced and disappeared COVID whistleblowers, and spread disinformation about the pandemic, investigating “what went on in China” requires greater transparency from China and the WHO on what they knew and when they knew it.”