By There can be bipartisanship in Congress, at least when it comes to the origins of COVID-19 pandemic, which reshaped the world and killed millions of people. On Friday, The House of Representatives unanimously voted to declassify information on possible links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Covid-19 pandemic, joining the Senate and sending the bill to the president for his signature.
Republicans and Democrats both want to know what China is hiding, it looks like.
“Covid first emerged in Wuhan, China, in 2019, though it’s still unknown how the virus spread to people. Scientists have clashed for years over whether Covid came from an infected animal that transmitted the virus to humans, or whether the pathogen escaped from a lab in Wuhan, reported CNBC.
The effort by Congress to declassify intelligence on the origins of Covid comes after the Energy Department concluded with ‘low confidence’ that the virus most likely escaped from a lab in Wuhan as the result of an accident.
The Energy Department is one of 18 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. The department was previously undecided on how the virus emerged.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also concluded that the pandemic likely started with a lab incident in Wuhan, the agency’s director, Christopher Wray, told Fox News earlier this month.”
The move puts President Biden in a tough spot. Despite his proclivities for covering things up, it is hard to drag your feet when the entire Congress wants something.
The Associated Press noted, “Led by Republicans, the focus on the virus origins comes as the House launched a select committee with a hearing earlier in the week delving into theories about how the pandemic started.
It offers a rare moment of bipartisanship despite the often heated rhetoric about the origins of the coronavirus and the questions about the response to the virus by U.S. health officials, including former top health adviser Anthony Fauci.
The legislation from Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., was already approved by the Senate.
Hawley urged Biden to sign the bill into law. ‘The American people deserve to know the truth,’ he said in a statement.”
Rep. Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, speculated to Fox News that the public might not like what they learn. She told Fox News, “I think that the writing is on the wall for the Biden administration. When you have Republicans and Democrats unanimously voting to declassify these intel reports, that’s pretty telling. And when you think about his reasons for dragging his feet, maybe it has to do with the fact that it really would force them to act. They would have to take action on China. They would have to take action on all of the funding sources for the W.H.O. for NIH, CDC, FDA.
It would open Pandora’s box and really expose the deep-rooted collusion between the Biden administration and all of the social media companies that had to work overtime to cover up all of the dissenting opinions on the issue of COVID. This really is the worst thing that could happen for the Biden administration, because it flies in the face of the narrative that they’ve been pushing for years. And I would say follow the money.”
Last year Anthony Fauci was accused of dragging his feet when a judge demanded that he had over communications between him and big tech companies to censor criticism. Missouri Attorney General argued that the former man in charge of America’s pandemic response colluded “with social media companies to remove from their platforms ‘truthful information’ about the efficacy of masks against Covid-19, a theory about the origins of the pandemic in a Chinese lab, and election security.”
President Trump provided Fauci with near-unprecedented authority over the pandemic response, opening a Pandora’s Box of sorts. With Trump handing the reins to Fauci by making him the face of the president’s response task force, he pushed national stay-at-home orders at the beginning of the pandemic and supported federal guidelines signed off and extended by the president to cover much of the Spring of 2020.
Fauci stepped down as NIAID Director right as it looked like Republicans would capture Congress and begin investigating potential connections between him and funding for the Wuhan institute. He’s collecting the largest pension in the history of the federal government.
According to The Washington Post, “One Democrat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private conversations, said that their side of the House voted for the bill because it doesn’t move the needle much beyond what Biden has already asked of the intelligence community. In May 2021, the president had asked intelligence agencies to probe the origins of the virus and deliver a report, which was submitted to the White House in August 2021.
A declassified summary said that four intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council believed with low confidence that the coronavirus most likely came from natural spillover from an infected animal. One agency said with moderate confidence that the virus most likely came from a lab leak in Wuhan, while three other intelligence community agencies were ‘unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information.’”
[Read More: Nine More Boxes Of Classified Biden Documents Seized]
