President Joe Biden was required in 2023, by a law he signed himself, to release what the federal government knows about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic that killed 1.2 million Americans.
He never really did.
In contrast, in less than a week in office the new Trump administration declassified a CIA assessment saying the disease most likely emanated from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, sponsored by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and passed unanimously by both the House and Senate, was signed into law on March 20, 2023.
As put by Politico.com, the law ordered “the Director of National Intelligence to declassify within 90 days of enactment all information relating to potential links between China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and COVID-19.”
“They are ordered to, they are required to, it’s mandated,” Hawley told The Heartlander as the June 2023 deadline came and went. “ It’s not a ‘please.’ It is the law. The law requires them to declassify what the federal government knows about COVID origins. …
“Joe Biden signed it because he didn’t really have a choice. How do you explain to the American people that you don’t want them to know about the origins of COVID? Especially after you’ve lied to them, as his administration has, and as (Dr. Anthony) Fauci did for years.
“You know, Fauci said, ‘Oh, it didn’t come from a lab; nobody believes that; that’s a conspiracy theory.’ Oh, really? Now we know that most of our intelligence agencies, or at least many of them, think that it did come from a lab.”
Indeed, a report that same month by independent journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi said scientists at the Wuhan lab were the first to contract the virus. The report even named the “patients zero” – the first known carriers – as Ben Hu, Ping Yu and Yan Zhu.
“The three scientists,” wrote the New York Post, “were researching ‘gain-of-function’ experiments with the virus — which increases its infectiousness and makes pathogens stronger in order to better understand their dangers — when they became sick in the fall of 2019, multiple US government officials reportedly told the journalists.”
After years of denial, in May 2024, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak admitted in a congressional hearing that the agency funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab.
“The risks of gain-of-function research on pandemic potential pathogens such as SARS and MERS outweigh the benefits,” the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs wrote in March 2023 – the same month Biden pledged under law to declassify COVID origins intelligence.
“Greater oversight of biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management in laboratories must be done by an independent national agency that doesn’t perform or fund research.”
NBC News couched the newly released CIA lab leak assessment as a “shift” in the agency’s thinking, and characterized its release as something the Biden administration laid the groundwork for just before leaving office.
“U.S. intelligence agencies and other government departments have been divided over the origins of the virus,” NBC reported Saturday. “The FBI and the Energy Department have said it was likely the virus was the result of a lab leak, while other agencies assessed that natural human exposure to an infected animal was the most likely scenario. The CIA had been agnostic until now.”
Had the Biden administration declassified the COVID origins intelligence as required by law, the public could have been able to judge for itself which of the agencies’ differing assessments was more likely true.
