Covid-19: US Senate bill would sanction Chinese officials blocking inquiry into coronavirus origins
- 16 Republican sponsors want to investigate whether the virus somehow escaped from an infectious diseases lab
- Bill has no support from Democrats, who have accused Republicans of fuelling anti-Asian racism in the US with coronavirus rhetoric
A new US Senate bill would punish Chinese officials for preventing an investigation into whether the Covid-19 pandemic could be tied to an infectious disease laboratory in Wuhan.
Introduced on Monday by Marco Rubio of Florida and 15 other Republican senators, the bill steps into a debate among scientists, politicians and governments about the hypothesis that, rather than being zoonotic – a natural virus that jumped from animals to humans – Covid-19 somehow escaped from a lab. The furore continues to fuel tensions between China and the US.
Called the Coronavirus Origin Validation, Investigation, and Determination (COVID) Act, the legislation would target officials in the Chinese Communist Party, military and State Council as well as the senior ranks of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The bill is a reworked version of similar legislation Rubio introduced last year, but that proposal did not include sanctions against Chinese officials and gained no support from other senators.
Freezing the officials’ assets and blocking them from entering the US, the sanctions would take effect 90 days after the bill’s enactment if the US was unable to certify that China had permitted a “transparent international forensic investigation” of laboratories in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus was first detected.
Most scientists believe that natural transmission from animals to humans is the most likely explanation for the outbreak. But some maintain that the possibility – however small – of a lab leak or other research-related incident warrants investigation.
