The United States Congress passed a law on Friday, March 10, ordering American intelligence services to declassify their information on the origin of the pandemic, while the hypothesis of a laboratory leak has returned to the fore. . In a rare moment of union, the elected members of the House of Representatives voted unanimously for this text. It had already passed the Senate with bipartisan support and it is now up to President Joe Biden to sign it into law.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines will then have ninety days to declassify “any information about potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of the coronavirus,” which has killed at least seven million people. people around the world since its detection at the end of 2019.
Division in the Intelligence Community
Hearing this week in Congress, Avril Haines stressed that there was a broad consensus that it was “neither a biological weapon nor genetic manipulation”. But the US intelligence community is divided between supporters of “a lab leak” and those of “exposure to a contaminated animal”, she recalled.
The first hypothesis, hotly contested by the Chinese authorities, has gained credence recently, after being deemed the most probable by the Director of the Federal Police (FBI), Christopher Wray, and the US Department of Energy. In the process, the World Health Organization had urged all countries, in particular the United States, to share their information on the origin of Covid.
