corona virus (expressive)
corona
A division between health officials and the US intelligence community over the origin of the virus
On Friday, the US House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill aimed at declassifying intelligence information about possible links between the Covid-19 epidemic caused by the Corona virus and a Chinese laboratory from which the virus is suspected to have leaked.
And last week, the Senate approved a request from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes to declassify documents related to this matter, which means that the bill has no choice but to send it to the White House for President Joe Biden to put his signature on it.
The Covid outbreak began in 2019 in Wuhan, eastern China, causing the death of about seven million people worldwide so far, according to official statistics, including more than one million in the United States.
US House of Representatives
But US health officials and intelligence agencies remain divided over the origin of the virus and whether it was transmitted to humans from an infected animal or leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The US Department of Energy’s conclusion that the virus may have been released as a result of a laboratory accident is consistent with the FBI’s assessments and inconsistent with the conclusions of other agencies.
Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, defended the leakage theory before the Senate on Wednesday, while the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health favor the hypothesis that the virus was transmitted from an infected animal.
“There is broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak was not the result of a biological weapon or genetic engineering. But there is no consensus on whether or not it was a lab leak,” Hynes added.
And when the Senate version of the COVID-19 declassification bill was introduced in February, co-drafter Josh Hawley said, “Now it appears these wise skeptics are right. The American people deserve to know the truth.”
In a separate effort, Republicans in the House of Representatives reintroduced a bill, on Friday, that would allow American citizens to sue China, which rejects the leak theory, because of the “massive distortion campaign” that it led during the spread of the virus.
“We must finally get to the bottom of what happened and who was involved in this deception in order to bring justice to those who have suffered so badly from COVID-19,” said New Jersey congressman Chris Smith.