The Republican chairmen of the House Oversight Committee and the subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic requested information from several people, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, surrounding the hypothesis that the coronavirus leaked accidentally from a Chinese lab.

This investigation must begin with where and how this virus came about so that we can attempt to predict, prepare or prevent it from happening again, Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, chair of the virus subcommittee, said in a statement.

Rep. James Comer, R-Tenn., chairman of the oversight committee, added that Republicans will follow the facts and hold U.S. government officials that took part in any sort of cover-up accountable.

The letters to Fauci, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines, Health Secretary Xavier Beccera and others are the latest effort by the new Republican majority to make good on promises made during the 2022 midterms campaign.

Wenstrup, who is also a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee, has accused U.S. intelligence of withholding key facts about its investigation into the coronavirus. Republicans on the committee last year issued a staff report arguing that there are indications that the virus may have been developed as a bioweapon inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

That would contradict a U.S. intelligence community assessment released in unclassified form in August 2021 that said analysts do not believe the virus was a bioweapon, though it may have leaked in a lab accident.

The letters sent Monday do not require the cooperation of recipients. But in announcing the Republican staff report in December, Wenstrup said that lawmakers would issue subpoenas if potential witnesses didnt cooperate.

Initially dismissed by most public health experts and government officials, the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated from an accidental lab leak began to receive scrutiny after President Joe Biden ordered an investigation into the matter in May 2021.

The 90-day review was meant to push American intelligence agencies to collect more information and review what they already had. Former State Department officials under President Donald Trump had publicly pushed for further investigation into virus origins, as had scientists and the World Health Organization.

Many scientists, including Fauci, who until December served as Bidens chief medical adviser, say they still believe the virus most likely emerged in nature and jumped from animals to humans, a well-documented phenomenon known as a spillover event. Virus researchers have not publicly identified any key new scientific evidence that might make the lab-leak hypothesis more likely.

But Republicans have accused Fauci of lying to Congress when he denied in May that the National Institutes of Health funded gain of function research the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world at a virology lab in Wuhan, China. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even urged Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Faucis statements.

Fauci, who served as the countrys top infectious disease expert under both Republican and Democratic presidents, has called the GOP criticism nonsense.

Cruz and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have previously said that an October 2021 letter from NIH to Congress contradicts Fauci. But no clear evidence or scientific consensus exists that gain of function research was funded by NIH, and there is no link between U.S.-funded research to the emergence of COVID-19. NIH has repeatedly maintained that its funding did not go to such research involving boosting the infectivity and lethality of a pathogen.

Nonetheless, Fauci indicated in November that he would cooperate fully and testify if Republicans followed through with their plans to investigate COVIDs origin.

I have no trouble testifying we can defend and explain everything that weve said, he told reporters during a White House briefing last year.

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The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released each decade, painted an equally grim, if not darker, picture for LGBQ+ teens. Along with teen girls, they fared more poorly than heterosexual males on nearly every metric examined, including substance abuse, experiences of violence, and factors impacting mental and sexual health.

Our teenage girls are suffering through an overwhelming wave of violence and trauma, and its affecting their mental health, Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDCs Division of Adolescent and School Health, told reporters Monday.

The authors called the differences between female and LGBQ+ teens, and heterosexual teen males, stark. While around a fifth of female and LGBQ+ teens experienced sexual violence in the past year, only 5% of males had. And while nearly 60% of female teens and nearly 70% of LGBQ+ teens had experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness during the past year, less than a third of males had.

Teens who identify as LGBQ+ or who have ever had a same-sex partner were more likely than their heterosexual counterparts to have misused substances, including illicit drugs, prescription opioids, alcohol, marijuana, and vapes. They were also significantly more likely to be a victim of violence in general.

There were some bright spots in the report, however, which examined trends from 2011 through 2021. Rates of risky sexual behavior and substance use are continuing to drop overall, and rates of school bullying are also on the decline.

But unfortunately, almost all other indicators of health and well-being in this report, including protective sexual behaviors, experiences of violence, mental health, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, worsened significantly, the authors note.

As we saw in the 10 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health among students overall continues to worsen, the authors wrote, adding that more than 40% of high school student surveyed suffered sadness or hopelessness that prevented them from functioning normally for at least two weeks in the year priora potential indicator of depression.

Overall, more students are opting not to go to school due to safety concerns, and males are reporting greater rates of electronic bullying, when compared to the decade prior according to the reportthe first of its kind to look at pandemic-impacted data, collected in the fall of 2021.

Although most schools had returned to in-person induction by that time, the time spent out of school for many students may have impacted topics participants were surveyed on like mental health, the authors state, noting that disruptions in daily life also remained common when the surveys were administered.

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