Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) are tapping their watches at President Joe Biden as a deadline looms for his administration to declassify all of its documents on the origins of COVID-19.
In March, Biden signed the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, which requires the Director of National Intelligence to “declassify any and all information” relating to links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the origins of COVID-19 within 90 days of the law’s enactment. That 90-day deadline is set to run out on Sunday, June 18.
“Your Administration has not yet provided any indication of when the relevant material will be declassified,” the Republican senators wrote.
The senators also reminded the president that they are seeking the greatest degree of transparency possible, noting that the COVID-19 Origin Act only allows redactions to protect intelligence sources and methods. The law specifically calls for the intelligence community to reveal if the WIV was conducting research on behalf of the Chinese regime’s People’s Liberation Army and whether the virology lab was researching or experimenting with coronaviruses. The law also calls for the intelligence community to reveal the names of any WIV researchers who fell ill in the autumn of 2019, whether they were involved in coronavirus experimentation, and specific dates for when their symptoms began.
“Your Administration should comply with the law as written and not undermine clear congressional intent to provide as much transparency to the American people as possible,” Hawley and Braun wrote. “We introduced the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023 earlier this Congress to hold China accountable for its obfuscation during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the beginning of the pandemic, China appears to have taken every effort to hide COVID’s origins from the world. The American people deserve to know how this pandemic began, and their democratically elected representatives have expressed their will unanimously. I urge you not to stand in their way.”
The COVID-19 Origin Act became law within 20 days of Hawley introducing it in the Senate. The legislation passed in an overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion with a vote of unanimous consent in the Senate and then a 419-0 voice vote in the House of Representatives.
The COVID-19 Story So Far
The first cases of COVID-19 were publicly reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.Early on in the outbreak, many prominent scientists focused on the hypothesis that the virus was the result of a natural transmission from a live animal and seafood wet market in Wuhan.
Others posed a different theory, that COVID-19 leaked from a laboratory such as the WIV, but the theory was criticized by government bodies and legacy media and suppressed on social media early on. Over the past three years, more and more researchers and officials have gradually come forward to voice their support for the theory.
