U.S. senators are calling for President Joe Biden’s administration to declassify materials regarding the origins of COVID-19

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) wrote on Twitter that documents described in a Wall Street Journal report “should be declassified.”

“President Biden needs to declassify everything we know today,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) added.

According to the report, the U.S. Energy Department is assessing that the pandemic likely started from a Wuhan laboratory leak.

The assessment was described in a document authored by the office of Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, a Biden appointee, the Journal reported.

The Energy Department, the White House, and Haines’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Energy Department told news outlets in a statement that it “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

Biden in 2021 said he had asked the intelligence community “to redouble their efforts to collect and analyze information that could bring us closer to a definitive conclusion” on the origins of COVID-19.

In an assessment (pdf) declassified later that year, the intelligence community, which Haines oversees, was split as to the origins of COVID-19.

Four intelligence community elements assessed with low confidence that COVID-19 came from animals, while one element stated that the pandemic likely started with “a laboratory-associated incident” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to the declassified report.

Three other elements “remain unable to coalesce around either explanation,” the report stated. “All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident.”

The individual elements weren’t identified.

Intelligence community entities include the FBI, the Energy Department, and the CIA.

The State Department has assessed, in a document (pdf) made public in 2022, that a lab leak was the most likely origin of COVID-19.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Feb. 26 said he would introduce legislation that would make all U.S. intelligence reports on COVID-19 “open to the people.”

No Animal Host Found

The first COVID-19 cases were detected in Wuhan, China, in late 2019. The United States has funded experiments at the Wuhan lab there.

No animal host for the virus that causes COVID-19 has been identified to date. Chinese Communist Party officials have repeatedly rebuffed attempts to probe the origins of the pandemic and have made various unsubstantiated claims, including that the illness stemmed from U.S. experiments.

The new reporting, top Republicans said, bolsters the position that the virus originated in the lab.

“This report affirms our belief that the substantial circumstantial evidence favors COVID-19 emerging from a research-related incident,” Rep. Cathy Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Reps. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) and Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), members of the panel, said in a joint statement.

“These revelations also further strengthen the need to uncover why high-ranking government officials, with help from Big Tech and the media, sought early on to silence any debate into a plausible theory of a lab incident while the Chinese Communist Party stonewalled investigations by the global scientific community,” they added.

Dr. Anthony Fauci and other top government officials worked to suppress talk of a possible lab leak.

Sullivan Responds

Asked about the new report, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on CNN on Feb. 26 that “there is a variety of views in the intelligence community.”

Sullivan said he wouldn’t confirm or deny the Journal’s reporting but confirmed that Biden had asked that the department “be brought into this assessment because he wants to put every tool at use to be able to figure out what happened here.”

“If we gain any further insight or information, we will share it with Congress and we will share it with the American people. But, right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question,” he added.

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said on NBC on Feb. 26 that public hearings need to be held on the matter.

“I think we need to have public hearings on this and really dig into it,” he said. “Think about what just happened over the last three years: one of the biggest pandemics in a century. A lot of evidence that it’s coming from the Chinese, and when other countries even raise it, like Australia, the Chinese use their coercive economic activities to shut people up. So I think we need to do extensive hearings.”

The Republican-held House has launched probes of COVID-19, including the pandemic origins and COVID-19 vaccines.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), who chairs the new House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, told The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet NTD Television that investigating the origins is important.

“Specifically to the origins, we feel it’s important to understand the evolution of [it] … and the more we know—whether it’s lab or natural—the more we know about it, the greater ability we would have to protect ourselves in the future,” he said.

The House Oversight Committee told outlets that intelligence officials responded to a Feb. 13 letter from Wenstrup and Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) asking for information about the COVID-19 origins. The panel said that it “is reviewing the classified information provided.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/senators-call-for-declassifying-documents-indicating-covid-19-came-from-chinese-lab_5085552.html

****************************************************

Censorship, PC agendas block fact-checking on Covid-19’s origins

Censorship and political posturing in the US has irreparably damaged our understanding of how the Covid-19 pandemic began.

Social media giants expunged content querying whether the virus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory.

Distinguished medical journals refused to publish scientific papers that examined whether the SARS-Cov2 virus may be a man-manipulated construct.

And purportedly trusted media outlets, such as the ABC in Australia, labelled the suggestion that a Wuhan laboratory might be responsible for the outbreak a conspiracy theory.

They did so as early as May 2020, misleading viewers, discouraging scientific debate and hosing down journalistic inquiry.

Media Watch host Paul Barry ridiculed our reporting at News Corp on the gain-of-function experiments scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were undertaking prior to the pandemic. “So, how likely is it that the virus escaped from that Chinese lab? Well, in short, it’s not,” he said authoritatively, on-air.

Yet now two US intelligence agencies have concluded that Covid-19 most likely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They are the FBI and the Department of Energy.

Another two agencies, including the CIA, are undecided while four say it’s more likely that the virus arose naturally.

None of these agencies has a high degree of confidence in their position.

As the President’s National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, told CNN on Sunday the intelligence community was divided on the question of how the pandemic began.

We might be able to answer this question with more confidence had censorship and political correctness not stymied research on this topic three years ago.

It’s stunning to think there has still not been a thorough, bipartisan investigation in the style of the 9/11 Commission, which interviewed over 1200 people in 10 countries, reviewing half a million pages of documents.

This is an action US President Joe Biden could take immediately which could help us come to a definitive view about how the pandemic began.

The National Institutes of Health, which funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is still refusing to hand over documents. It is going to court rather than disclose information that could implicate it further in the dangerous research that was underway in Wuhan.

It’s nonsense to say there is no evidence to suggest the virus leaked from a laboratory.

The evidence is not definitive, it is not conclusive, but it is overwhelming.

Consider the research Wuhan scientists were undertaking to make bat coronaviruses more lethal and more transmissible, the concerns over safety protocols held by its own laboratory director, the cover-up at the laboratory itself in November 2019 and the way the CCP reacted when the virus began to spread.

There’s certainly more evidence linking the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the start of Covid-19 than there is evidence to support the theory that the most infectious virus in a century simply arose naturally.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/censorship-pc-agendas-block-factchecking-on-covid19s-origins/news-story/b37ac05d7ba57d6c64d121c08814313f

****************************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) Also here

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH) Also here

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

**************************************************