The United States Congress adopted a law on Friday, March 10, which orders the American intelligence services to declassify their information on the origin of the pandemic, while the hypothesis of a laboratory leak has returned to the fore. . In a rare moment of union, the elected representatives of the House of Representatives voted for this text unanimously. It had already passed the Senate with bipartisan support and it is now up to President Joe Biden to sign it into law.
National Intelligence Director Avril Haines will then have ninety days to declassify “any information on potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the coronavirus”which has killed at least seven million people worldwide since its detection in late 2019.
Division in the Intelligence Community
Hearing this week in Congress, Avril Haines underlined that there was a broad consensus on the fact that it was not a question “neither of a biological weapon nor of genetic manipulation”. But the American intelligence community is divided between supporters “of a laboratory leak” and those “from exposure to an infected animal”she recalled.
The first hypothesis, strongly contested by the Chinese authorities, has gained credibility recently, after being deemed the most likely by the Director of the Federal Police (FBI), Christopher Wray, and the US Department of Energy. In the process, the World Health Organization had urged all countries, in particular the United States, to share their information on the origin of Covid.