US lawmakers vote to declassify intel on Covid origins

WASHINGTON: The US House of Representatives voted unanimously on Friday to declassify information on potential links between the Covid-19 pandemic and a Chinese laboratory suspected of leaking the deadly virus.

The Senate had already voted last week to require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify the material, meaning the bill now goes to the White House for President Joe Biden’s signature.

The Covid-19 outbreak began in 2019 in the eastern Chinese city of Wuhan, leading to almost seven million deaths worldwide so far, according to official counts, over a million of them in the United States.

But health officials and the US intelligence community remain divided over whether it was spread to humans from an infected animal or escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The US Energy Department concluded with “low confidence” that the virus probably escaped via a lab accident, agreeing with the assessment of the FBI but contradicting the conclusions of several other agencies.

Robert Redfield, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Protection, argued for the lab leak theory before senators on Wednesday, while the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Institutes of Health identified an infected animal as the likely culprit.

“Basically there’s a broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak is not the result of a bioweapon or genetic engineering. What there isn’t a consensus on is whether or not it’s a lab leak,” Haines added.