The House on Friday approved a bill requiring the nation's intelligence chief to declassify any evidence of a link between a major lab in China and the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019.
The measure, which passed on a unanimous 419-0 vote, calls on Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify and report to Congress within 90 days on possible ties between the virus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“The intelligence community does have more information about COVID than the public is led to believe,” he said. China’s Communist regime has sharply denied the Wuhan lab was responsible for the virus and criticized U.S. and global efforts demanding more information on COVID-19’s origins. Beijing has also floated widely-discredited counter-theories that the U.S. military or other sources were responsible for the deadly virus.
“Knowing that [Chinese President] Xi Jinping and his Communist regime systematically failed to be truthful and transparent, our legislation seeks to not only gain access to more information but also provide much-needed relief to the loved ones of those who died and others who have suffered severe economic loss during the pandemic,” Mr. Smith said.
Floor debate devolved at times into partisan finger-pointing over the role of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key face of the pandemic response. Republicans criticized Dr. Fauci for supporting the natural-evolution theory early on, prompting Democrats to accuse the GOP of impugning the doctor.
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