Biden Signs Bill to Declassify Covid-Origins Intel
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President Biden signed a bill on Monday that authorizes the federal government to declassify all available intelligence pertaining to the origins of Covid.
“My Administration will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID-19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Biden said in a statement.
“In implementing this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against the disclosure of information that would harm national security,” Biden said.
The legislation, which received bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress, directs the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information concerning China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Nearly three years after dismissing it as a conspiracy, some legacy media outlets have now embraced the hypothesis that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. The consensus explanation at the outset of the pandemic was that the virus was not engineered but rather naturally occurring and jumped from animals to humans.
There are “potential links” between the research conducted at the institute and the outbreak of the disease, the bill notes.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Energy had concluded in a classified intelligence report that the virus has escaped from a lab in Wuhan. That assessment agreed with the FBI’s from 2021, when it found the pandemic was likely the result of a lab leak. FBI Director Christopher Wray also stated that conclusion last month in the first public opinion of the sort from the agency.
Proponents of the argument that COVID spontaneously and organically emerged in nature claimed that the DOE’s new assessment was offered with “low confidence.” However, the National Intelligence Panel assessment’s conclusion that Covid originated via “natural transmission” was also given with “low confidence,” NR’s Jeff Blehar pointed out.
