The US State Capitol in Washington houses the US Congress – the US House of Representatives and the US Senate (Image: Reuters).
The Senate already voted last week to require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to make the material public, meaning the bill now heads to the White House for President Joe Biden’s signature.
The US House of Representatives voted unanimously on Friday to make public information about a possible link between the Covid-19 pandemic and a Chinese laboratory suspected of leaking the deadly virus.
The Senate already voted last week to require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to make the material public, meaning the bill now heads to the White House for President Joe Biden’s signature.
The Covid-19 outbreak began in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan in 2019, causing nearly seven million deaths worldwide so far, according to official counts, more than a million of them in the United States.
But health officials and the US intelligence community are divided over whether it spread to humans from an infected animal or originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The US Department of Energy concluded with “low confidence” that the virus probably escaped through a laboratory accident, agreeing with the FBI’s assessment but contradicting the findings of several other agencies.
Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Protection, argued for the lab leak theory before senators on Wednesday, while the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health identified an infected animal as the likely culprit .
“Basically there is a broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak is not the result of a bioweapon or genetic engineering. There is no consensus on whether or not it was a lab leak,” Haines said.
When the Senate version of the bill was introduced in February, its co-author Josh Hawley said anyone asking whether Covid-19 originated in a lab was “silent as a conspiracy theorist and was branded.”
“Now these prudent skeptics have been proven. The American people deserve to know the truth,” he said.
In a separate effort, House Republicans on Friday reintroduced legislation giving US citizens the right to sue China — which discredits the lab leak theory — over its “massive misrepresentation campaign” during the outbreak. Is.
Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey said, “We must finally face the truth about what happened and who was involved in this hoax, so that justice can be done for those who were seriously affected by COVID-19.”
The commonsense appeal of the lab leak theory was articulated by American comedian Jon Stewart on late night TV in 2021.
“There is a novel respiration corona virus Overtaking Wuhan, China,” he said. “What do we do? Oh, you know who we can ask? Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab.”
He continued to joke: “Oh my god, there’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?'”
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)