WASHINGTON—President Joe Biden has signed into law a bill mandating the declassification of intelligence related to the origins of COVID-19, saying that he shares “Congress’s goal of releasing as much information as possible” on the issue.
“We need to get to the bottom of COVID-19’s origins to help ensure we can better prevent future pandemics,” Biden said in a statement. “My Administration will continue to review all classified information relating to COVID19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
He added that, in implementing the legislation, the 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.”
This month, both the Senate and the House unanimously passed the bipartisan bill, dubbed “COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023,” before sending it to Biden’s desk. The bill directs the director of national intelligence to “declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin” of COVID-19.
Efforts to find out the origin of COVID-19 have consistently met with resistance from China, where the communist regime has covered up cases, silenced whistleblowers trying to sound warnings on the virus’s danger from the onset of the pandemic, and repeatedly refused outside investigators to probe the virus origins.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been the center of contention as a suspected source where the virus may have leaked.
The debate came back to the surface again recently after reports that the Energy Department has assessed the lab leak theory as the “most likely” source of the pandemic, a conclusion that the FBI has also reached.
In May 2021, Biden ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to probe into the issue, which resulted in an inconclusive assessment of the virus origins, but “that work is ongoing,” he said on March 20.
By Eva Fu
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