Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by a World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origin of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan, Hubei province, China February 3, 2021.
Thomas Peter | reuters
The House of Representatives voted unanimously on Friday to make public information on possible links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and COVID-19 Pandemic, sending bill to the President Joe Biden,
The Senate also earlier this month voted unanimously to require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to make such information public.
Covid first emerged in Wuhan, China in 2019, although it is still unknown how the virus spread among people. Scientists have clashed for years over whether Covid came from an infected animal that transmitted the virus to humans, or whether the pathogen escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.
Congress has attempted to declassify intelligence on the origins of Covid after the Energy Department concluded with “low confidence” that the virus most likely escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan as the result of an accident.
The Department of Energy is one of the 18 agencies that make up the US intelligence community. The department was earlier undecided on how the virus emerged.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation also concluded that agency director Christopher Wray started the pandemic with a laboratory incident in Wuhan. told Fox News earlier this month,
“The FBI has long assessed that the origin of the pandemic is a possible laboratory incident in Wuhan,” Ray told Fox News. “Here you are talking about a possible leak from a laboratory controlled by the Chinese government.”
“I would just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, is doing its best to sabotage and disrupt the work here, the work that we’re doing, the work that our US government and close foreign partners are doing ” are doing. And it’s unfortunate for everyone,” Ray said.
Biden Ordered to the Intelligence Community in 2021 To provide an updated analysis of how the pandemic emerged. Intelligence agencies were divided on how Covid began to spread among humans, though they said both a natural origin and a laboratory leak were plausible.
four unnamed agencies in it 2021 report arrived at a less confident assessment that an infected animal transmitted the virus to humans. The intelligence community agreed that COVID was not developed as a biological weapon, and most agencies assessed that the virus was not genetically engineered.
According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the Energy Department’s position, the Central Intelligence Agency and another unnamed agency are undecided about whether the virus is of natural origin or came from a laboratory.
“At the moment, there is no definitive answer from the intelligence community on this question,” said Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser. told CNN last week, “Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. Many of them have said that they do not have enough information to be sure.”
Sullivan said Biden had specifically requested that national laboratories under the Department of Energy participate in an intelligence review of how the pandemic began. He would not confirm or deny reports about the Energy Department’s assessment that a lab leak was more likely.
Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, former heads of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health, respectively, have maintained that the most likely transmission of Covid to people is from an infected animal. Three years after the start of the epidemic, such an animal has not been identified.
House Republicans have called on Fauci, Collins and other former and current health officials To testify on the origin of the pandemic.
China has denied that the virus originated from a lab. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning pointed to a report by the World Health Organization was published in March 2021 which stated that a laboratory origin of the pandemic was “considered extremely unlikely.”
But America and 12 other countries WHO report strongly criticized Because the experts who wrote it did not have access to the full, original data and samples.
On the day the report was published, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that all hypotheses of the origin of the pandemic are out there and require further study. Tedros last week called on Beijing to be more transparent.
“The WHO calls on China to be transparent in sharing data and to conduct necessary investigations and share results to that effect – until then, all hypotheses on the origin of the virus remain open,” Tedros told a news conference. Geneva.
He also called on the US to share any information about the origins of the pandemic.
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