President Joe Biden on Monday signed legislation requiring the release of intelligence documents about a potential link between the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and a biolab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
“We need to understand the origins of Covid-19, including possible links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Biden said in a statement. “In implementing this law, my administration will declassify and release as much of this information as possible.”
“I share Congress’ goal of releasing as much information about the origins of Covid as possible,” Biden added.
The president said that in 2021, upon taking office, he “asked the intelligence community to use all the tools at their disposal to investigate.” This work is “in progress” but as much material as possible will be released without “injuring national security”, he said.
The bill poses political risks for Biden due to tensions with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Beijing categorically rejects the possibility that a leak during research in a laboratory in Wuhan could trigger a global pandemic.
However, the majority of members of Congress want to continue to develop this theory, and this question has become a rallying point, in particular, for Republican opponents of Biden. Congress passed and sent the bill to Biden in March.
The Covid-19 epidemic began in 2019 in the city of Wuhan in eastern China. According to official figures, almost seven million people have died worldwide so far, more than a million of them in the United States.
However, public health officials and the U.S. intelligence community remain divided on whether the virus was randomly transmitted from an infected animal or leaked during research at the Institute of Virology in Washington. Wuhan.
The US Department of Energy, one of the federal agencies investigating the crash, concluded with “low confidence” that the virus likely originated in a laboratory, agreeing with the FBI’s assessment but contradicting the conclusions of several other agencies.
