The House cast what has been seen as a landslide vote late last week on the subject of approving the declassification of all intelligence from the Biden administration when it comes to the actual origins of the COVID-19 virus.
The House reported a final vote of 419-0, all in favor of the bipartisan measure, as reported by Axios. Additionally, the Senate issued a unanimous vote this past week to approve a measure that carried the same weight. The bill would mandate the full declassification and immediate release of all known intelligence in relation to the origins of COVID and of the possible connections to the virus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) within a window of 90 days from the moment the bill gets the presidential autograph.
Both the Department of Energy and the FBI recently and separately delivered assessments which found that COVID most likely originated as part of a leak from a lab in Wuhan. The theory, which has been labeled the lab leak hypothesis and has been the target of most Republicans, was quickly dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory that ended up being stigmatized throughout the early points of the pandemic by top scientific and medical officials, which included former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci.
Intensive investigations into the origins of the COVID-19 Virus have been hindered by roadblocks put in place by China, which has openly and angrily pushed back against requests for additional information and for access to be allowed for international investigation teams. Beijing has also exclaimed the idea that COVID did not in any way originate in the Wuhan lab, and instead had been created by members of the U.S. military.
A number of Republicans have continued to put the lab leak theory as the most likely origin for the pandemic-inducing virus that killed multiple millions of people across the globe.
“The American public deserves answers to every aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic, including how this virus was created and specifically, whether it was a natural occurrence of was the result of a lab-related event,” stated the chairman of the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), as reported by Fox News.
“The House intelligence committee, which oversees our intelligence community, is aware of classified information that could help inform the public why COVID-19 as a lab leak theory is not just a possibility, but approaches the idea that it is likely,” he concluded.
