The walls were covered with hundreds, if not thousands of documents. There were maps drawn with red crisscrossing lines connecting cities in China, newspaper clippings tacked to a corkboard, pictures of bats, mice and minks, and timelines stretching the length of the room. Posters were plastered over older versions of posters, each with a key deciphering colors, shapes and symbols, and stamped with the seal of the U.S. Senate.
It was June of 2022 in Washington. Outside the Hart Senate Office Building, the near 32-degree Celsius heat was sweltering, but the conference room provided an escape from the sticky swamp. There, Robert Kadlec, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response under the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump, known by close associates as "Dr. Doom,” had spent months scouring documents and conducting interviews alongside men with backgrounds spanning from national security to infectious disease to laboratory safety and health policy.
This was all at the behest of U.S. Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, a Republican member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. He'd tasked Kadlec a year prior with figuring out where COVID-19 had come from.