Rep. Michael McCaul, ranking GOP member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, made the revelation during a Tuesday panel presentation organized by House Republicans on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. “New testimony now received by my committee reveals the Chinese military potentially took over this lab, not in January 2020 as was reported, but earlier in 2019,” McCaul said. “The Chinese military were actually in the facility at the time of 2017. That signals the CCP was worried about something at the lab before the world even knew what COVID-19 was. Why else would they put the Chinese military in charge?” A State Department fact sheet released in January contended Wuhan lab researchers “conducted experiments involving the bat coronavirus identified by Wuhan virologists in January 2020 as its closest sample to COVID-19," and the lab “has a published record of conducting ‘gain-of-function’ research to engineer chimeric viruses.” The fact sheet also asserted lab workers became sick with coronavirus-like symptoms in autumn 2019.