88R9167 TBO-F

By: Cain H.C.R. No. 28

CONCURRENT RESOLUTION

WHEREAS, The citizens of the State of Texas have the right to know if wasteful government spending on taxpayer-funded experiments on bats and humanized mice caused the death of over 1 million Americans and over 6.6 million people worldwide; and

WHEREAS, The United States Congress has a duty to the citizens of the State of Texas to promote the general welfare, and the President of the United States has a duty to ensure that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed; and

WHEREAS, It is well documented that pathogens contained in highly secure laboratories around the world, including SARS viruses in China, have breached containment with deadly consequences on many occasions; and

WHEREAS, The U.S. National Institutes of Health has confirmed that, between 2014 and 2019, it sent approximately $600,000 of taxpayers' money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to collect coronaviruses from wild bats and manipulate them in animal experiments; and

WHEREAS, The U.S. State Department expressed concern in 2018 about safety lapses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the pandemic threat posed by its bat coronavirus experiments; and

WHEREAS, The National Institutes of Health has confirmed that it funded gain-of-function animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that engineered bat coronaviruses to be as much as 10,000 times stronger than their natural counterparts; and

WHEREAS, A U.S. Senate Committee on Health Education, Labor and Pensions report has determined "the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 that resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic was most likely the result of a research-related incident"; and

WHEREAS, In its 2022 Annual Threat Assessment, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declares, "One Intelligence Community element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology"; and

WHEREAS, A growing majority of the American public believes that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a lab leak; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the 88th Legislature of the State of Texas hereby call on the federal government of the United States to:

(1) conduct an unbiased and comprehensive investigation of the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, including whether it resulted from a lab leak in Wuhan;

(2) ensure that the investigation is conducted without influence by the government agencies and personnel involved in funding this research; and

(3) issue a final report summarizing the findings of the investigation, without redaction, and make the report available to the citizens of the State of Texas in its entirety.