The bill sponsored by Republican Senators Mike Braun of Indiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri to require the Biden administration to declassify U.S. intelligence related to the link
between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the COVID-19 pandemic has passed the Senate.
First introduced in April, the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2021 passed the Senate by unanimous consent. In March 2020, Senator Hawley was the first member of Congress to call for an international investigation into China’s cover-up of the spread of coronavirus and, in April 2020, introduced legislation to allow American citizens to sue the Chinese government for damages.
Senator Braun, speaking on the bill said:
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal revealed three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report.
Though many scientists, including former CDC Director Robert Redfield, have been outspoken about the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic began with a lab leak, the media and others have denied that possibility from the beginning.
Now that it is clear that the lab leak theory is completely viable, Americans need real answers.
We will not get those answers from another botched investigation from the World Health Organization, or more cover-ups by China’s Communist regime.
Americans have been through so much from this virus. Many of us have lost friends and loved ones, many have lost businesses they’ve spent their lives building.
President Biden must declassify all U.S. intelligence related to any link between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the COVID-19 pandemic, so that independent researchers and the American people can get answers.
This bill will make sure that Americans and independent researchers have all the information available to them on this issue that matters so much both for those who have been affected by this pandemic, and for preventing the next one.
As Andrew Solender reported for Forbes, the bill requires the Director of National Intelligence to declassify “any and all information” about links between the lab and the virus within 90 days.
The bill also calls for the DNI to make “as much information as possible” about the origin of the virus publicly available, in order to identify the origin “as expeditiously as possible.”
Specific questions the bill seeks to answer are the “activities performed” by the Institute, the identities, symptoms and covid status of the three researchers, and their roles at the Institute – specifically whether they were “involved with or exposed to coronavirus.”
While support has grown among Democratic lawmakers to investigate the origins of Covid-19, House leaders have not yet said whether it will get a vote in the lower chamber and the White House hasn’t said if President Joe Biden will sign it.
If passed by the House and signed by Biden, the bill would require the DNI to submit an unclassified report to Congress with redactions limited to those that “protect sources and methods” without “altering or obscuring” vital information.
What is most interesting is not the substance of the bill, but how quickly the narrative has turned now that the Wall Street Journal reported on the lab workers who became ill. Suddenly, the lab leak theory was no longer a Trump-based fringe conspiracy theory – it became real. It even prompted the Leftist censors at Facebook to stop labeling such media coverage as “fake news” and taking down articles about the now-mainstreamed lab leak.
And it has even prompted Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress to at least play along with the idea of releasing the intelligence – information that has no doubt been known since the very beginning of the pandemic, but was withheld by the intelligence agencies to avoid giving support to President Trump.
We doubt that Democrats are going to release official information that is going to create another “Trump was right” moment, but we commend Senators Hawley and Braun for drafting the bill and getting Senate Democrats on record as supporting it.
And there’s another reason we doubt there will be a release of official government intelligence. We think it is just as likely to show that there was no “leak” but an experiment to provide the Red Chinese with proof of concept on how a bio-warfare attack could work to destroy our economy.
A proof of concept that we might add, then allowed them to move directly to the execution phase of the attack by permitting them continued access to our media to spread fear through propaganda, by permitting them continued access to our homeland to spread the disease by keeping transportation links open between Red China and the United States, and by permitting them continued access to our capital markets to rebuild any collateral damage to their own economy. All things advocated and supported by Democrats against the policy recommendations of conservatives and supported by Republican President Donald Trump.
COVID-19 origin
Dr. Anthony Fauci
Donald Trump administration
Sen. Josh Hawley
Sen. Mike Braun
China
declassify intelligence
Wuhan Institute of Virology
COVID-19 Origin Act of 2021