US President Joe Biden on Monday issued a law declassifying intelligence about possible links between the coronavirus (COVID-19) and its leak from a virology laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan at the end of 2019.
Biden said he shared Congress' goal of releasing as much information about the origin of COVID-19 as possible, but added that his administration would take national security into account when deciding what information to release.
"As part of the implementation of this legislation, my administration will declassify and share as much of that information as possible, consistent with my constitutional authority to protect against disclosure of information that could harm national security," Biden said in a statement.
The House of Representatives (Republican majority) and the Senate (Democratic majority) unanimously passed the bill after broad consensus.
The pandemic has caused a major rift between the two major parties in the United States, both over vaccination and prevention measures.
In March, FBI Director Christopher Wray said it was "very likely" that the pandemic was caused by a leak from a lab in Wuhan, two days after a similar hypothesis was put forward by the U.S. Department of Energy. Beijing vehemently denies this.
The statement prompted the World Health Organization to ask all countries to share information they have about the origin of COVID-19.
But scientists are still 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.
A highly politicized debate about the origin of the coronavirus has been raging in Washington almost since the first human infection was reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, amid calls from Democrats and Republicans for President Biden to respond more strongly to China.