Lawmakers who have long pressed for transparency on COVID-19 origins said they are underwhelmed by the declassified U.S. intelligence report, saying that the administration hasn’t been fully transparent with what it knows.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) released the long-anticipated report on June 23 evening, days after missing a 90-day deadline mandated by the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023. Passed by Congress and signed into law in March, the act requires disclosure of any possible links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which has been viewed as a likely pandemic origin.
While providing glimpses into activities going on at the Wuhan lab before the pandemic, the 10-page report—including three pages in appendices—isn’t conclusive on the virus source, instead leaving it open whether it may have been a product of nature or the lab.
“This Friday night ‘news’ dump of a mere 10-page summary is a slap in the face of Americans who deserve full transparency about what information the government possesses regarding the origins of COVID-19,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“Perhaps the most important lesson we’ve learned throughout the pandemic is that our government must be honest and forthcoming if we are ever to restore public trust and obtain justice for the victims of the pandemic—both those who lost their lives to the virus and those whose lives were harmed by unscientific lockdowns and mandates. This report fails to live up to either.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, noted reports earlier this week confirming names of the Wuhan virology lab researchers who had fallen ill with COVID-like symptoms in the autumn of 2019. While there’s no definitive evidence whether those researchers had contracted the virus, one of those researchers was identified as Ben Hu, who worked for years on U.S.-funded bat coronavirus research together with Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist who has been linked to the lab leak controversy.
The Friday report raised biosafety concerns with WIV’s handling of SARS-like viruses, the shortage of properly trained personnel at the facility, and experiments on SARS-like coronavirus in lower biosafety labs in early 2019 despite known risks. It maintained that the presence of sick researchers “neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19.”
By Eva Fu
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