The Government of Joe Biden will declassify and deliver to Congress the information available to its intelligence services on the origin of the covid and, in particular, on the possibility that the pandemic originated from an escape of the virus from a laboratory in the city Wuhan, China, where the first cases of the disease were detected. Biden has signed this Monday the law that will allow that information to be known.
Different US intelligence agencies have reached opposite conclusions about the origin of the pandemic. A few weeks ago, a report from the Department of Energy was leaked that pointed to a “low level” of confidence in the thesis that it originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In addition, the director of the FBI, Chris Wray, assured that his agency shares that thesis as the most probable. Other government departments, on the other hand, believe that the origin is natural and that it spread from the Wuhan market.
With this hot controversy, Congress quickly approved a law to force the director of National Intelligence to declassify the information in this regard that the Administration has within 90 days. The so-called “Covid-19 Origin Act of 2023” was proposed by Missouri Republican Congressman Josh Hawley, but it won support from both Republicans and Democrats.
Biden signed the law this Monday, as announced in a statement. “I share the goal of Congress to disclose as much information as possible about the origin of the disease,” he says in his note.
Biden recalls that, shortly after taking office, he ordered the intelligence community in 2021 to use all the tools at its disposal to investigate the origin of the covid. “That work is ongoing. We need to get to the bottom of the origins of covid-19 to help make sure we can better prevent future pandemics. My Administration will continue to review all classified information regarding the origins of COVID-19, including possible links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he said.
In application of the law that he has signed, Biden promises that he will “declassify and share as much information as possible.” The law already allowed censoring information regarding sources and methods of the investigation, to safeguard their identity. Biden also mentions his “constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that could harm national security.”
The law passed by Congress it is short. Orders to declassify all information related to possible links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the covid, including activities carried out by the Institute “with or on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army”, research on coronaviruses or other related activities carried out at the Institute before the covid outbreak and also information about researchers from said Institute who fell ill in autumn 2019.
The text of the law requests that the name of the researcher, the symptoms, their onset date, their role within the Wuhan Institute of Virology, be identified in the case of these patients, if they were involved in or exposed to research on coronavirus, whether the investigator visited a hospital while ill, and a description of any other actions taken by the investigator that may suggest that he or she was experiencing serious illness at the time.
The previous president, Donald Trump, frequently used the origin of the disease as a dialectical weapon of confrontation with China. Biden had so far avoided using that issue in the confrontation with China. The leak of the Department of Energy’s findings and the passage of the law come at a time of growing tension between the two superpowers. Biden has signed the law on the same day that Xi Jinping visits Vladimir Pitin in Moscow.
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