The new Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives is preparing to shine a bright light on science—and scientists.
This week, it created two investigative panels that will scrutinize the country’s relationship with China and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Both committees are expected to grill many prominent scientists and federal research officials on their actions over the past several years.
The China committee will build on previous congressional reports that have questioned the value of continued scientific collaboration with China despite the large number of students and scientists born in China who conduct research on U.S. campuses and run high-tech companies. The 365-to-65 House vote to create the panel points to a bipartisan consensus that U.S.
Ties with China will be a focus of the pandemic panel as well. The Wuhan lab received some U.S. government funding, leading to accusations that U.S. officials squelched concerns about the lab and attempted to mislead the public about the pandemic’s origins. Representative James Comer , chair of the House oversight panel that will administer the select committee, has said it will investigate “what the U.S. government knew regarding the origins of COVID-19 and when the government knew it.
Other targets include conservation biologist Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that subcontracted a grant from NIAID to the Wuhan laboratory, and four scientists involved in producing a 2020paper that concluded SARS-CoV-2 was not engineered in a laboratory. They are Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, Michael Farzan of UF Scripps Biomedical Research, Robert Garry of Tulane University, and Ian Lipkin of Columbia University.
Jordan is also the presumptive chair of the new select panel, which will report to the Judiciary Committee that he chairs. This week, on the House floor, he said it will pursue how agencies such as FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have jeopardized the freedoms of religion, speech, the press, and the right to assemble guaranteed to all residents by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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