Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) team tasked with investigating the origin of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China, February 3, 2021.
Thomas Peter | Reuters
The House of Representatives on Friday voted unanimously to declassify information on possible links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Covid-19 pandemic, sending the bill to President Joe Biden.
The Senate also voted unanimously earlier this month to require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify such information.
Covid first emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, though it remains to be unknown how the virus spread to humans. Scientists have argued for years over whether Covid got here from an infected animal that transferred the virus to humans, or whether the pathogen escaped from a lab in Wuhan.
Congressional efforts to declassify intelligence on Covid’s origins come after the Department of Energy concluded with “low confidence” that the virus most definitely escaped from a Wuhan lab in an accident.
The Department of Energy is one of the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The department was previously undecided as to how the virus originated.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation also said the pandemic likely began with an incident in a Wuhan lab, agency director Christopher Wray, told Fox News earlier this month.
“The FBI has been assessing for a very long time that the source of the pandemic is most definitely a possible laboratory incident in Wuhan,” Wray told Fox News. “You are talking a few potential leak from a lab controlled by the Chinese government here.”
“Let me just indicate that it seems to me that the Chinese government is doing all the things in its power to thwart and obscure the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our US government and shut foreign partners are doing. And that is unlucky for everybody,” Wray said.
Biden ordered the intelligence community in 2021 to provide an updated evaluation of how the pandemic emerged. Intelligence agencies were divided on how Covid began spreading amongst humans, although they said each a natural original and a lab leak were likely.
Including 4 unnamed agencies 2021 report achieved low credibility rankings that an infected animal transmits the virus to humans. The intelligence community agreed that Covid was not developed as a bioweapon, and most agencies assessed that the virus was not genetically modified.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the Department of Energy’s position, the Central Intelligence Agency and one other unnamed agency are undecided whether the virus is of natural origin or originated in a lab.
“Right away, the intelligence community doesn’t have a definitive answer to that query,” said Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser. he told CNN last week. “Some elements of the intelligence community got here to conclusions on one side, some on the opposite. Many said there simply wasn’t enough information to be certain.”
Sullivan said Biden specifically asked the Department of Energy’s national labs to take part in an intelligence review into the start of the pandemic. He would neither confirm nor deny reports of the Department of Energy’s assessment that a lab leak is more likely.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, former heads of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health respectively, maintained that Covid most definitely spread from an infected animal to humans. Such an animal couldn’t be identified three years after the beginning of the pandemic.
House representatives called on Fauci, Collins and other former and current health officials to testify concerning the origins of the pandemic.
China has denied that the virus escaped from a laboratory. Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Mao Ning pointed to a report by the World Health Organization published in March 2021, which stated that a laboratory origin of the pandemic was “considered extremely unlikely”.
But the US and 12 other countries strongly criticized the WHO report since the experts who wrote it didn’t have access to the complete, original data and samples.
On the day the report was released, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said all hypotheses concerning the origin of the pandemic are on the table and more research is required. Tedros urged Beijing last week to be more transparent.
“WHO continues to call on China to be transparent about data sharing and to conduct the needed investigations and share results for this purpose – until then, all hypotheses concerning the origin of the virus remain on the table,” Tedros said at a news conference in Geneva.
He also called on the US to share any information it has concerning the origin of the pandemic.
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