Joe Biden announced Monday, March 20, in a press release that he had enacted a law allowing the declassification of documents concerning the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, which appeared in China.
“We need to get to the bottom of the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic to ensure we can better prevent future pandemics,” the US president said. “My administration will declassify and release as much information as possible,” while respecting “national security,” he pledged.
Initially supported by the Republican opposition, this text was finally the subject of a massive consensus with the Democrats, since it was voted on March 10 unanimously by the House of Representatives, with a conservative majority. This consensus is all the more remarkable since the pandemic has created particularly deep partisan divisions in the United States, whether on vaccination or preventive measures, among others.
The divided scientific community
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently believed that a lab accident in Wuhan, China was “highly likely” the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic, soon after a similar hypothesis was put forward by the US Department. Energy. This has led the World Health Organization in particular to ask Americans to share their information.
But the scientific community remains divided, between the proponents of the hypothesis of transmission by intermediate animal and those who defend the thesis of the escape from a laboratory in Wuhan.
New genetic data has just revived the hypothesis of a zoonotic origin of the pandemic, by documenting the presence in a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan of DNA traces of raccoon dog, civet and other mammals – animals susceptible to have served as intermediate hosts favoring the passage of SARS-CoV-2 from bats to humans.
