The US House of Representatives approves the declassification of intelligence documents about the origins of the Corona virus

Yesterday, Friday, the US House of Representatives unanimously approved a bill aimed at declassifying intelligence information about possible links between the Corona virus (Covid-19) and a Chinese laboratory suspected of having the virus leaked from it.

Last week, the Senate approved a request from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haynes to declassify documents related to this matter, which means that the bill is left with nothing but to send it to the White House for signature by President Joe Biden.

The Covid outbreak began in 2019 in Wuhan, eastern China, causing the death of about 7 million people worldwide so far, according to official statistics, including more than a million in the United States.

But US health officials and intelligence agencies remain divided over the origin of the virus, and whether it was transmitted to humans from an infected animal or leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And the US Department of Energy concluded that the virus may have been released as a result of a laboratory accident, and thus it is consistent with the assessments of the Federal Bureau of Investigation "FBI" (FBI) and contradicts the conclusions of other agencies.

Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, defended the leakage theory before the Senate last Wednesday, while the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health favor the hypothesis that the virus was transmitted from an infected animal.

"There is broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak was not the result of a biological weapon or genetic engineering. But there is no consensus on whether or not it was a lab leak," Hynes said.

When the Senate version of the COVID declassification bill was introduced in February, co-author Josh Hawley said the first person to question whether Covid originated in a lab "was silenced and called a conspiracy theorist."

"Now it turns out that these wise skeptics were right. The American people deserve to know the truth," Hawley added.