President Biden signed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 into law, which requires the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information related to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. The bill was introduced by Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Mike Braun, R-Ind., and passed both the House and Senate unanimously.
The bill officially states the information should be released so the United States can identify COVID’s origins and stop a similar pandemic from occurring again. But lawmakers also want the American people to have answers.
“There’s increasing speculation, and indeed increasing numbers of statements from government officials saying that perhaps this virus originated in a Chinese lab, in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Sen. Hawley said. “Well I think it’s time that the American people got to decide for themselves, it’s time that they actually got to see the evidence that the United States government has collected on this issue.”
The bill requires the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify information related to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and COVID’s origins.
That includes:
- Activities at the institute on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army.
- Coronavirus research or other related activities at the lab.
The director must also declassify information about individual researchers at the institute who got sick in the fall of 2019, including:
- Their name.
- Symptoms.
- Whether they were hospitalized.
- Whether they were involved in, or exposed to coronavirus research.
The information must be released by the June 18 deadline. The director will submit a declassified report to Congress which can only have redactions that protect intelligence gathering sources and methods.
