US Senate unanimously passes bill to declassify intelligence information on Wuhan lab and origins of the coronavirus

Wednesday night, the US Senate unanimously passed legislation by a voice vote requiring the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to declassify information regarding the origins of the novel coronavirus.

Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) co-sponsored the COVID-19 Origin Act, a bill which provides 90 days for the ODNI to declassify "any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the coronavirus disease."

The legislation requires the information to be given to Congress in an unclassified report including experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as COVID-related activities prior to the outbreak.

The bill would also require any information regarding researchers at the lab who became sick with COVID symptoms in the fall of 2019, including their names and if they visited hospitals.

Hawley said on the Senate floor, "The American people deserve to know about the origins of the COVID-19. They deserve to know how this terrible pandemic that has ravaged the globe and our country, how it got started and what's China's role in starting it."

Braun added that the information "needs to be revealed to the American public."

The legislation passed in the wake of revelations that President Joe Biden’s administration reportedly terminated an investigation launched by the State Department under Mike Pompeo into the possibility of the COVID pandemic originating from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The liberal media has pivoted its coverage of the possibility of the lab leak from conspiracy during the Trump administration, to a credible theory under the Biden administration.The narrative began to change in the media following the publishing of a new report which stated that three researchers from the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019 with symptoms consistent with the coronavirus.

Earlier Wednesday, following the publication of the report regarding the White House torpedoing the investigation into the Wuhan lab, President Biden tasked US intelligence agencies with redoubling their efforts to determine the virus's origins within 90 days. Top intelligence officials, including Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, acknowledged at a hearing in April that a laboratory accident was a plausible scenario that the intelligence community was investigating.