Posted on 03/02/2023 7:51:04 AM PST by SeekAndFind
A pair of Republican senators on Wednesday night declared the U.S. Senate had unanimously passed their bill requiring the Biden administration to declassify intelligence related to the origins of COVID-19.
The bill, known as the COVID-19 Origin Act of 2023, specifically aims to investigate the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.
Republican Sens. Mike Braun and Josh Hawley reintroduced the bill on Monday after the Department of Energy (DOE) provided a classified intelligence report to the White House and certain members of Congress, which concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic most likely arose from a lab leak. The FBI had previously come to a similar conclusion.
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) made a request for unanimous consent of the bill, which was granted “without objection.” Unanimous consent enables a bill to pass without a recorded vote.
“Tonight the Senate UNANIMOUSLY passed my bill to declassify all the intelligence the government has on #covid origins. Let the people see the truth!” Hawley wrote on Twitter.
In further comments during an appearance on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Hawley cited the importance of transparency and accountability in allowing the public to understand the origins of the pandemic.
Tonight the Senate UNANIMOUSLY passed my bill to declassify all the intelligence the government has on #covid origins. Let the people see the truth! — Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) March 2, 2023
Hawley told Watters that the bill needs to pass in the House of Representatives, “and then we can get this thing done.” They previously introduced a similar bill which passed unanimously in 2021.
The bill would require Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to declassify the information in the U.S. government’s possession on the most likely origins of COVID-19.
“Listen, the American people—it’s past time—let’s show them what the government has. Let everybody see for themselves. Let everybody read it,” he told Fox News after the vote.
Braun also declared the unanimous passage of the motion, likewise calling on the House to pass the bill.
“The House needs to pass this bill to let the American people see the facts! President Biden can’t ignore this: time to let Americans decide for ourselves,” he wrote on Twitter.
On Monday, Hawley expressed concerns about the lack of transparency surrounding the pandemic’s origins, saying that for “nearly three years,” those questioning the Wuhan lab leak theory were “silenced and branded as a conspiracy theorist.”
However, the DOE’s report supports oft-maligned hypotheses that the virus emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is located nearby to a wet market broadly cited as the pandemic’s ground zero.
“Now, these prudent skeptics stand vindicated,” Hawley said in a statement.
“The Biden administration must immediately declassify all intelligence reports pertaining to the origins of COVID-19 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The American people deserve to know the truth.”
Braun also criticized the Biden administration for its posturing on the lab leak theory.
“The Biden administration has called the lab leak theory a conspiracy theory from the beginning, and has only started to publicly admit they were wrong as the evidence becomes overwhelming,” Braun said in a statement.
Braun said that the Biden administration had kept information about the origins of COVID-19 a secret despite an earlier version of this bill passing the Senate unanimously in 2021.
“The American people deserve transparency, free from government censors or media spin. It’s time to declassify everything we know about COVID’s origins and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now,” he said.
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The Chinese regime has long dismissed the possibility of a lab leak, saying the virus’s origins “should not be politicized.” Its efforts to suppress the theory recently included warning Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX, not to share the lab leak report.
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