WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden on Monday inked into law a bill requiring the release of intelligence materials on possible links between the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory in Wuhan, China, AFP reported.
The US President said in a statement, “We want to get to the bottom of coronavirus’s origins…, including possible links to the Wuhan laboratory,”. “In executing this legislation, we will release and share as much of that material as possible,” Biden added. President Biden said, “I share the Congress’s aim of releasing as much materials as possible regarding the origin” of Covid-19”.
US President signs law releasing intelligence on COVID-19’s Origin
Joe Biden added that in 2021, after assuming office, he had “issued directives to the Intelligence Community to use every instrument at its disposal to probe.” He maintained that work is “ongoing,” but as much as possible materials will be released without causing “damage to national security,”.
The bill posed political hazards for President Biden, who is negotiating difficult relations with Chinese President Xi Jinping. China dismisses the possibility that a leak during research at the Wuhan laboratory could have released the global epidemic. However, US Congress adopted and sent the bill to Joe Biden in March.
The Covid-19 outbreak started in 2019 in the Chinese city of Wuhan, leading to seven million deaths across the world so far, as per official counts, over one million of them in the US. However, health officials and the United States intelligence community remain divided over whether Covid-19 was spread haphazardly to humans from an infected animal or leaked from the Wuhan laboratory.
