(DCWatchdog.com) – President Joe Biden has signed into law a bill mandating the federal government to declassify certain intelligence information regarding the origins of the COVID-19 virus.
The bill in question was passed unanimously by the US House of Representatives on March 10, after a unanimous vote in the Senate a week earlier.
According to a report by The New York Post, Biden’s signature comes after he spent a week pondering over whether to sign the new legislation.
“I share the Congress’s goal of releasing as much information as possible about the origin of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID–19),” the president declared in a statement released by the White House on Monday.
The law will oblige the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify within 90 days any information gathered by the US intelligence community on the links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and the origins of the coronavirus outbreak.
In his statement, Biden pointed out that in 2021 he instructed US intelligence to “use every tool at its disposal” to discover the true origin of COVID-19.
He added that work on the matter was “ongoing” and that he would seek to make public “as much of that information as possible.” That includes “potential links” to the Wuhan lab.
“We need to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins to help ensure we can better prevent future pandemics. My Administration will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID–19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” the president stated.
“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 added.
Last month, the US Department of Energy became the second federal agency to support the theory that the novel coronavirus most likely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Communist China.
The lab origin theory is also backed by the FBI, whose chief Christopher Wray last month told Fox News that “for quite some time now,” his agency had “assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
“The Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing and that’s unfortunate for everybody,” Wray declared.
Last year, Republicans on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee announced their conclusion that COVID-19 was probably leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The GOP lawmakers also pointed out a lack of evidence to back the theory that the coronavirus had gone “naturally” from animals to humans.
What is your opinion? Do you think intelligence information regarding the origins of the COVID-19 virus should be declassified? Why or why not? Please share your thoughts and views by emailing [email protected]. Thank you.
