The U.S. House unanimously passed a bill to declassify documents and intelligence information related to the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. The bill had already been approved by the Senate.
The declassification order specifically refers to any information related to the activities of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, citing “potential links” between the research work conducted at the facility and the first outbreak of COVID-19.
The origin of the coronavirus pandemic has been debated for some time now and according to experts, understanding it better could offer new resources for prevention, in order to prevent the rapid spread of a new disease from happening again in the future, causing millions of deaths (COVID -19 has so far resulted in about 7 million only considering the official data). China has always strongly rejected the hypothesis of a laboratory accident, also citing the conclusions of the World Health Organization which called it “very unlikely”.
On March 1, however, FBI director Christopher Wray had publicly declared for the first time that the US federal police investigative agency believes that the most probable origin of the spread of the coronavirus is an accident “in a laboratory controlled by the Chinese government”.
Wray’s statements came two days after similar findings from the US Department of Energy. Other intelligence agencies of the United States, on the other hand, continue to have divergent hypotheses on the origin of the coronavirus and believe that the assessments of the Department of Energy are weak and that they have arrived at it with “little conviction”.
